E-commerce company Mercari, which operates a licensed Australian financial derivatives exchange, has selected digital asset custody provider METACO to launch its institutional digital asset custody operations.
As part of the mandate, Mercari will use METACO’s digital asset custody and orchestration platform, Harmonize, to enable clients to securely store, trade, and settle digital assets. Harmonize is supported by IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services.
IBM Cloud Protect Services are designed to reduce risks of malicious code insertion during Harmonize deployments and address unauthorised rule manipulation by working to make policies on the platform.
The mandate will allow Mercari to scale to millions of wallets while maintaining control over private keys for risk management and ensuring that keys are securely stored on local infrastructure in Australia.
Mercari has been developing a growing suite of crypto-asset investment services. In January, it launched the Mercari DAR Crypto Reference Rates, the first local and robust AUD crypto-asset benchmarks for the Australian and Asian markets.
Patrick Enjalbal, managing director of Asia Pacific at METACO, comments: “We are proud to partner with Mercari, a regulated and innovative exchange, to support engagement with the asset class in Australia.
“Our platform, Harmonize, provides institutional-grade security and governance for the custody of crypto-assets while ensuring the requisite flexibility and agility for innovators like Mercari to go to market and scale quickly.”
Brian Price, director of Mercari, says: “Our work with strategic partners such as Metaco and IBM Cloud will help ensure that Mercari maintains a standard of excellence commensurate with the most stringent of true institutional use case expectations. We are anticipating that without ultra-high grade domestic institutional digital asset custody the industry will struggle to attract wide-based internal compliance and regulatory support.”
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