We are thrilled to announce the launch of Bunker, our cornerstone disaster recovery platform and the closing of a $5 million seed round led by Matt Walsh and Castle Island Ventures. Other investors including Notation Capital, Semantic Ventures, SCB 10X and CoinShares.
Where We Are Going
For a long time we have watched organizations of all sizes struggle with private key management. This has been against the backdrop of more and more institutions opting to self-custody their assets as they see custodians continually have issues ranging from security to operational to solvency to fraud. The intersection of these two things--struggles with private key management and increasing self-custody--creates a ticking time bomb. Unfortunately, one that we have seen detonate numerous times in recent years at even the most well-intentioned firms. The result of this situation has caused counterparty risk to remain a top concern as we enter what seems to be the next market cycle. Together with Dr. Adam Everspaugh and a team of world class engineers, we are building Station70.
Today marks a special day as we launch our first product, Bunker. This will serve as a foundational product where we bring to bear an incredible amount of experience across the crypto industry with the aim of simplifying private key backup and recovery (KBR). We see it as our mission to provide the tools needed by organizations to address broad trust and safety challenges related to the security and accessibility of digital assets. KBR, and other products we are building will directly enable institutions industry-wide to rapidly mature their business continuity approach. As a former CISO (and still one at heart) I had a front row seat to these challenges involved with self-custody and using non-custodial or "wallet-as-a-service" providers. There are many quality wallet providers in the industry, and we are excited to be working with many of them, most notably Fireblocks as we embark on this journey.
Products and the Future
We envision an industry where trust and safety are core features and not afterthoughts. But to do that, infrastructure needs to be secure, efficient and scalable while also enabling the business. We see Bunker as the first of many products we will launch to that end. It will be offered in a Standard and Enterprise configuration each having the same underlying cryptography, security and core technology. Enterprise being a more premium product for organizations that require advanced configurations, tailored compliance features, customized regulatory and audit reporting and insurance. Also only available to Enterprise customers is our Recovery Response Service (RRS) that is an additional technology service that aids in the setup, configuration and implementation of our failover wallet architecture. A resilient approach and overlay to existing wallet-as-a-service platforms that you wont find elsewhere. By using RRS and in the event of an outage at their primary wallet provider, customers can get back to trading faster and safer as compared to any other product available today. This is especially important as outages often occur during periods of high market volatility.
Stay Tuned
In the coming weeks, we with a number of customers, will be putting Bunker to the test as we drive towards providing a generally available release. We have a lot of work to do between now and then and I'd ask that you stay tuned.
If you have interest in Bunker please don't hesitate to use the contact form below.