Galaxy Digital, the crypto-focused financial services firm founded by Mike Novogratz, has closed its acquisition of institutional self-custody platform GK8. The purchase comes more than two months after Galaxy won an auction to buy the company from bankrupt crypto lender Celsius.
The acquisition of GK8 will help build out Galaxy Digital’s forthcoming prime brokerage platform, GalaxyOne. GalaxyOne will offer a wide range of financial services for institutions, including trading, lending, derivatives, cross-portfolio margining, and a number of custodial options, including GK8. Galaxy also gains an office in Tel Aviv and a nearly 40-person team, including the founders, who have joined Galaxy to lead its custodial technology offering.
GK8 solutions are tailored toward traditional finance and crypto-native institutions such as banks, hedge funds and brokerage client eToro. The infrastructure lets clients enable staking, decentralized finance (DeFi) networks, non-fungible token (NFT) support, trading services, and more. GK8 offers its services through a multi-party computation (MPC) vault, an automated digital asset storage method that splits the private key needed to access the assets between an unlimited number of co-signers, and a cold vault, a slower but more secure method where transactions are processed manually.
GK8 has developed patented cryptographic techniques that allow its cold vault to create, sign and send transactions to the blockchain without an internet connection. This removes the risk of cyber attacks, as the private keys are never exposed to the internet.
Galaxy Digital’s acquisition of GK8 is a major step forward in the development of its prime brokerage platform, GalaxyOne. The platform will offer a wide range of financial services for institutions, including trading, lending, derivatives, cross-portfolio margining, and a number of custodial options, including GK8. With GK8’s secure and innovative custody solutions, Galaxy Digital is well-positioned to become a leader in the institutional crypto space.