Through this partnership, Bitwala now leverages the full spectrum of Europe’s leading Banking-as-a-Service platform, from digital bank accounts, cards and KYC to custody of digital assets.

“Bitwala is an international crypto banking pioneer and we are excited to deepen our successful and innovative partnership with this significant component. Not only does this enable us to offer Bitwala's customers a custody solution that is unparalleled in terms of ease of use and security, but also to open up new avenues for additional features such as instant crypto transfers" says Alexis Hamel, Managing Director of Solaris Digital Assets.

Bitwala customers in Europe will be able to store both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) on the Solaris Digital Assets Platform. The new joint service, that will be accessible from January 2021, builds on the existing cooperation between Bitwala and Solarisbank. Since September 2018, Bitwala has leveraged the Banking-as-a-Service platform of Solarisbank to offer its growing customer base digital bank accounts and debit cards.

In the new wallet set up, the so-called "private keys" of Bitwala's customers, which grant access to the digital assets on the blockchain, are generated and managed by Solaris Digital Assets in its secure infrastructure. New Bitwala customers no longer need to generate a wallet themselves, but will instantly have a crypto wallet in the app for a seamless customer experience.

With the custody solution of Solaris Digital Assets, Bitwala can offer a secure and compliant wallet offering to their customers with benefits such as increased transaction speed and reduced fees. When it comes to security, Solaris Digital Assets' distributed approval process ensures that each transaction is separately approved by the end customer, and authenticated by Bitwala before it is validated by Solaris Digital Assets. This model brings additional security for both the end customer and for Bitwala by reducing the risk of a single point of failure. Bitwala will continue to offer a ‘self-custody’ wallet for advanced users who want to hold their private keys themselves.

“We have already been leveraging Solarisbank’s Banking-as-a-Service platform for over two years. Thus, the API-based custody service of Solaris Digital Assets was a natural choice to securely safeguard our customers’ digital assets, while still maintaining full ownership over our user experience. By integrating the custody solution, we can ease the onboarding for new customers and significantly enhance the speed of on-chain transactions, “says Benjamin Jones, CEO & Co-founder of Bitwala.

To offer the cutting-edge custody solution and ensure highest security standards, Solaris Digital Assets works together with the Israeli technology provider Curv. Curv's decentralized security model utilizes multi-party computation (MPC) protocols, enabling transactions to be securely signed in a mathematically-proven, distributed way.

In Germany, companies holding digital assets for others require permission from the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht - BaFin). Solaris Digital Assets GmbH has submitted an application for the crypto custody license to BaFin and currently operates under the provisional license for crypto custody.