In brief
- Mobile-only bank Revolut will be using Revolut's tech to offer "new crypto services."
- Neither Revolut nor Fireblocks will say what exactly that entails.
- Revolut is set to reveal its plans later this month.
Fireblocks, a company that helps large companies shift cryptocurrency between exchanges, today announced that crypto-friendly challenger bank Revolut is using its technology to introduce “new crypto services.”
But both Revolut and Fireblocks are being coy about what those services are.
Fireblocks makes it easier and more secure for big companies to move funds between smart contracts and on and off exchanges without logging in and out of each one. Supported exchanges include Huobi Global, OkCoin, and Bithumb.
Revolut is a challenger bank, a mobile-only bank that offers lower cross-border transactions. In 2018, it started letting customers buy and sell Bitcoin.
Revolut now supports a few currencies, and the London-based bank this year expanded to the US, meaning that all of its 13 million customers can buy and sell crypto. The caveat is that they can’t move their crypto out of Revolut, though the bank is working on this.
Revolut’s annual financial report, released in August, showed that customers held £93 million ($121 million) in crypto at the end of 2019. This is about 2.5 times more than at the end of 2018, when the bank held £37 million ($48 million) worth of customers’ cryptocurrencies.
Armed with Fireblocks, Revolut can, theoretically, ramp up its crypto offering.
Curiously, Fireblocks did not say how, only that Fireblocks will “efficiently scale the framework of [Revolut’s] crypto services,” and “support the introduction of new crypto services.”
Ed Cooper, Revolut’s head of crypto, didn’t let on either. He said in a statement that integrating with Fireblocks “will enable us to rapidly add more advanced crypto features,” and that he’s working with Fireblocks to “explore all the new experiences that we can offer our customers in the near future.”
“Wish I could give more info here. They haven't announced the services yet, but Revolut is planning to announce this themselves in the next few weeks,” Danielle Cerasani, a spokesperson for Fireblocks, told Decrypt.
Decrypt reached out to Revolut to shine a light on things. A spokesperson told us, "We cannot comment on future plans at the moment."