Where it came from
Fireblocks tells its own origin story as a security investigation rather than a product idea. Its about page says that in 2017 the Lazarus Group took $200 million of bitcoin from four South Korean exchanges, and that the people who went on to found the company were working at Check Point and were part of the task force that looked into it. The three named founders are Michael Shaulov, Pavel Berengoltz and Idan Ofrat, and a company press release dates the business to 2018.
What it built
The technical claim is specific. Rather than storing a private key in one place and guarding that place, Fireblocks splits key material using multi-party computation, so a signature is produced jointly by shares that never come together into a whole key. The company pairs that with hardware isolation and a policy engine that governs which transactions an operator may approve.
Two things follow from that design. The first is that the company sells to institutions that already have compliance and approval workflows and want them enforced in software. The second is that Fireblocks itself does not have to hold custody to be in the custody business, since customers can run the platform over their own key shares.
It also does hold custody, through a separate regulated entity. Fireblocks Trust Company, LLC is chartered as a limited purpose trust company by the New York State Department of Financial Services to engage in virtual currency business activity, which the department's own licensee list dates to August 2024.
The company's privacy policy names Fireblocks Inc. as the contracting entity. It does not state an incorporating jurisdiction and this entry does not guess one, so the field is omitted rather than filled. Its product line now runs well beyond Bitcoin, into stablecoin issuance, tokenisation and payments. Listing here is not endorsement.