Google is preparing to unveil a new digital asset security platform aimed at banks and institutional investors as demand for secure cryptocurrency custody continues to grow. The company plans to introduce Google Multi-Party Compute (MPC) at its first digital assets symposium in New York City on Wednesday.
The service is currently available only through a private preview, with major financial institutions and selected design partners testing its capabilities. Google confirmed to CoinDesk that Alphabet, its parent company, has also started using the technology to protect its own digital assets on Ethereum and Solana.
The company has not revealed which institutions are participating in the trials or identified the assets Alphabet is securing. A commercial launch is planned for early 2027, while pricing information remains undisclosed.
Multi-party computation is an established security technique in the cryptocurrency industry. It divides control of a private key into multiple shares that can be distributed across separate systems, allowing participants to authorize transactions without keeping the complete key in one place. Google has previously explored this approach, publishing guidance in 2023 on building MPC-based digital asset systems with its Confidential Space infrastructure.
Google says the new product marks its first dedicated MPC custody offering for cryptocurrencies. Its existing services, including Google Cloud Key Management Service (KMS) and Cloud HSM, already help organizations manage cryptographic keys. The new platform combines distributed signing, transaction policy controls and key recovery in a purpose-built service for digital assets.
The launch comes as banks and financial services companies consider blockchain infrastructure for tokenized investments, payments and custody. Because confirmed blockchain transactions are generally irreversible, institutions need reliable safeguards to ensure that transfers are properly authorized.
“Digital asset adoption and tokenization are at an inflection point. As regulated financial institutions begin adopting blockchains and tokenization, they need scalable, proven infrastructure to secure their clients’ assets,” Rich Widmann, director of digital assets strategy at Google Cloud, told CoinDesk.
Private-key protection remains one of the industry’s most significant security challenges. An attacker who obtains control of a wallet’s private key may be able to transfer its assets without the owner’s consent.
Data from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis showed that compromised private keys accounted for 43.8% of cryptocurrency stolen in 2024. DeFiLlama figures indicated that blockchain hacks and exploits had caused cumulative losses of $16.69 billion by June this year, with approximately 40% of the losses associated with private-key compromises.
Several recent incidents demonstrate the consequences of these weaknesses. In March, stablecoin protocol Resolv lost around $25 million in an attack involving a compromised private key linked to a privileged account and vulnerabilities in its token-minting system. In June, attackers obtained the private keys of a Humanity Protocol foundation member and drained more than $32 million from at least 17 wallets. The breach also contributed to a drop of over 80% in the project’s token price.
Google’s MPC platform is designed to limit the risks associated with concentrating signing authority in one key. Instead, multiple participants or computing systems hold separate cryptographic shares that must work together to authorize a transaction.
Google says the complete private key is never stored in one location. This structure can reduce the damage caused by a compromised machine. The company also states that customers retain control of their key material and that Google cannot view it in unencrypted form, even when shares are stored on its cloud infrastructure.
AI and quantum computing add to the threat landscape
Google is positioning the platform against a changing cybersecurity environment, where artificial intelligence is helping some attackers scale their operations and quantum computing could eventually threaten existing cryptographic systems.
Chainalysis reported that cryptocurrency scams connected to AI-tool vendors generated an average of $3.2
