IBM is announcing IBM Hyper Protect Offline Signing Orchestrator (OSO)—a new technology to help deploy cold storage solutions for digital assets, and the latest addition to its confidential computing portfolio.
OSO is designed to “address limitations of current cold storage offerings for digital assets, including the need for people to perform manual procedures for the execution of a cold storage transaction. It helps protect high-value transactions by offering additional security layers including disconnected network operations, time-based security and electronic transaction approval by multiple stakeholders.”
Hyper Protect OSO provides a policy engine “that brokers communication between two different applications that have been designed not to communicate directly with each other for security purposes, providing an efficient and securable solution to facilitate digital asset transactions.”
IBM has worked with Metaco, an IBM Business Partner and digital asset custody provider, and tier 1 banks, to help ensure OSO addresses client requirements.
Metaco Harmonize offers a highly robust and secure orchestration system “for digital asset applications and will leverage this solution. OSO acts as the intermediary between two Metaco components running in separate Hyper Protect Virtual Server instances: the Harmonize Core that is externally available to receive signing requests and the Harmonize Cold Vault that is isolated.”
Adrien Treccani, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Metaco, said:
“As a provider of institutional grade custody infrastructure that is trusted by some of the largest global custodians and banks, it is our responsibility to deliver cutting-edge digital asset security to our clients. IBM’s confidential computing division has been a reliable partner throughout the years, and we are pleased to complement Metaco’s catalog of institutional cold storage solutions with the unique air-gapped cold storage that OSO enables, especially as cold storage requirements are increasingly being stipulated by regulators in markets such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.”
Metaco Harmonize leveraging OSO can enable “an even more seamless transaction environment with zero exposure to the digital assets in cold storage, offering an attractive alternative to the current commercially available physically air-gapped cold storage technologies.”
This ultimately gives Metaco’s clients the critical optionality “to deploy an institutional cold storage solution fit for their unique operating and risk management models.”
The digital assets market continues to grow
As the financial ecosystem matures, eventually all assets “are subject to be tokenized.”
IBM expect the tokenization of global illiquid assets “to grow as a business opportunity in the coming years. With the continued progression of the industry, there is a need for a more mature solution for cold storage that will support this market growth.”
Certain concepts and approaches “have evolved in terms of securely managing digital assets. A hot, or online storage system is connected to the internet. A “warm” storage system offers a higher level of security than hot wallets since they store private keys offline, but they are less convenient since they require manual intervention to connect to the internet when needed.”
For more details, check here.