Cold War
Swiss Crypto Vault’s facility, like Xapo’s, is located in one of the hundreds of bunkers built in the Cold War to resist a nuclear attack. The venture leases a section of the bunker and has a backup facility elsewhere. To prevent hacking, the cryptocurrency keys are stored offline. PricewaterhouseCoopers will regularly review the security setup, and a notary must be present if the venture’s own executives want to open the vault.
The first rule of owning Bitcoin is to securely keep the private key that lets you spend your coins. Even physically carrying the key doesn’t guarantee immunity from hacking. Carrying hardware wallets “won’t bring you very far. This is simply not an institutional-grade solution,” Nikolajsen said.
A greater comfort level among those institutional investors could help revive the price of Bitcoin, which has tumbled more than 55 percent this year as regulators step up scrutiny of what critics have deemed a vehicle for fraud.
“The next level for the crypto community is for additional institutions to enter the space,” Vonmoos said. “They will only do so if there is a super secure way of storing the assets or the private key."
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.