GK8 announced its product is now insurable via Aon UK to protect client assets under custody at a coverage cap of potentially $500 million. GK8’s custodian technology is operational and helps to securely manage digital assets for companies like eToro.
The Aon policy is designed to cover internal theft, as well as external theft, loss, damage, or destruction of the assets stored in their cold wallet. The premium is comparably low for two reasons, according to a company statement. First, the need for insurance highly depends on how the client utilizes the security and processes provided by GK8; Second, GK8’s technology was evaluated as having extremely low risk. The company held a successful bounty program in February, in which it dared more than 700 hackers to breach its cold wallet for a bounty of $250,000 in bitcoin. None were successful.
The cold wallet, which only transmits data and therefore totally unhackable, protects the vast majority of the transaction, while the MPC (multiparty computatiion) wallet protects the rest. This means a hacker would have to invest much more in breaking into the MPC wallet than they could ever gain from stealing from it.
“We have worked hard to demonstrate the validity of GK8’s solution to insurers so that the company’s clients can benefit from pre-negotiated insurance coverage to protect the digital assets in their care, custody, or control,” said Tom Davis, client director of Aon UK, in a statement.
“Often, we see people purchase an insurance policy and then hold in the aggregate funds well above the limit of that insurance policy,” says Lior Lamesh, CEO of GK8, in a statement. “So for us, it was an important guarantee that when a customer is on-boarded to our platform, the full value of their assets is insured.”