Google is unveiling Google Multi-Party Compute, a crypto custody system that splits signing keys across separate systems, at its first digital assets symposium in New York today. The product is in private preview with several financial institutions, and Alphabet has started using it to secure its own assets.
The system divides a signing key into fragments held by separate parties or machines. A transaction requires a set number of fragments to sign, and the full key is never assembled in one place. A bank could hold one share on its own hardware, another in Google Cloud, and a third with a rival cloud provider. Institutions can set thresholds such as two-of-three or five-of-seven. Before any signature, a policy engine running inside Google's Confidential Space checks the transfer against limits, destination restrictions, and approval rules. Google says it has no access to key shares in unencrypted form.
Google plans commercial availability in early 2027 and has not disclosed pricing.
The company frames the product around security risks. Chainalysis attributed 43.8% of cryptocurrency stolen in 2024 to compromised private keys. DeFiLlama data shows roughly 40% of the $16.69 billion lost to hacks through June came from key compromises. In June, an attacker took seven keys from one developer's computer during the Humanity Protocol breach and drained wallets across two networks.
Google also frames the product against AI-enabled fraud. Chainalysis found that scams linked to AI tool vendors averaged $3.2 million per operation in 2025, compared with $719,000 for other scams. Google researchers estimated that a sufficiently powerful future quantum machine could derive a bitcoin private key from an exposed public key in about nine minutes. Roughly 6.9 million bitcoin have exposed public keys. Google says its architecture can adopt post-quantum signatures later without forcing institutions to rebuild their systems, but it has set no timetable.
Google enters a market led by Fireblocks, Fordefi, and BitGo. Google argued that its banking relationships and security expertise give it an advantage. Banks already use specialized platforms, such as BNP Paribas's custody work with Metaco, and multi-institution vaults built with BitGo.