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About
Summary
Valuation

Founded: 2017

Headquarters: Oakland, California

PolySign is a transformative financial technology company providing institutional investors with cutting-edge blockchain-enabled infrastructure in support of digital assets across the capital markets and payments sectors. The PolySign family of products includes MG Stover and Standard Custody and Trust Co. MG Stover is a full-service fund administration firm built by former auditors and fund operators to deliver world class solutions to the alternative investment industry. PolySign’s New York-regulated custodian, Standard Custody & Trust Company, is a next-generation Qualified Custodian offering novel, patented technology for securing secret keys.

Key Facts

1

PolySign’s mission is to drive global use of digital assets by building best-in-class infrastructure that enables institutions to secure and transact in digital assets across the capital markets and payments sectors.

2

PolySign’s solutions are making the world of digital assets more attractive to institutional investors and accelerating the transition from traditional finance to decentralized finance.

3

Leading blockchain architects Arthur Britto (Co-Founder of Ripple Labs) and David Schwartz (CTO and Chief Cryptographer of Ripple) designed PolySign's technology engine for securing digital assets.

4

PolySign’s core products include a digital asset custody solution offered through Standard Custody & Trust Company, a subsidiary of PolySign, a fund administration business through its acquisition of MG Stover in April 2022, and AtomicNet, a settlement layer that would offer instant and automatic settlement for a range of assets. PolySign expects to launch AtomicNet in the first quarter of 2023.

5

Standard Custody & Trust Company, a regulated custodian by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), offers a security program that combines proprietary blockchain technology, end-to-end encryption, and distributed trust protocols to protect private keys.

6

Standard Custody provides many key competitive advantages when compared to other digital asset custodians: (1) Conflict-Free Segregation, (2) Segregated account, (3) Regulatory Compliance, (4) Security, (5) Speed, and (6) Fiduciary Key Management.

7

The platform’s integrated escrow solution enables investors to buy and sell digital assets directly from custody, reducing the risk of external transfers and inefficient transactions between multiple accounts and different providers. Standard Custody facilitates 24/7 investor market access with improved security and capital efficiency.

8

As noted in the Company’s New York Trust Charter, Standard is entrusted with keeping its customers’ assets secure at all costs and will never commingle them with other client assets to achieve any ulterior motive or business interest. Exchanges generally keep client assets in an omnibus account leaving client assets at risk in the case of an insolvency. At Standard Custody, all of its clients’ accounts are segregated.

9

MG Stover, which has approximately $40 billion in digital assets under administration, is a full-service fund administration firm that services hedge funds, private equity funds, and venture capital funds. As the largest digital fund administrator in the United States, MG Stover delivers world-class solutions for institutional investors operating in the alternative investment space, including specialized fund accounting, treasury management, KYC/AML due diligence and offshore compliance.

10

MG Stover has also built a leading proprietary back-office data aggregation and reconciliation software that supports the reporting process of hundreds of digital asset funds.

11

The acquisition of MG Stover’s best-in-class fund service capabilities will enable PolySign to deliver a comprehensive, vertically integrated custody, trading and administration offering to institutional investors for cryptocurrency and digital assets.

12

Besides the $53 million in equity funding for the Company’s Series C round, PolySign also received a credit facility worth $25 million from private equity firm Boathouse Capital.

13

When asked why PolySign went for the credit facility instead of raising a bigger Series C round, CEO Jack McDonald told The Block that it was a "very deliberate" decision to raise debt for the first time. PolySign, in fact, raised more equity than it initially planned, he added. "We have a lot of confidence in our business and in our future opportunities, so we did not want to share more equity with investors,” said McDonald.

14

PolySign plans to expand in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and the Company is looking to support decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms within its infrastructure.

15

PolySign’s acquisition of MG Stover follows the Company’s notable developments in 2021, when Standard Custody & Trust Company, LLC, received its trust charter from the New York Department of Financial Services, one of the most well-developed and highly-respected digital asset regulators in the world.

16

In May 2021, PolySign announced a strategic partnership with Cowen Digital, Cowen Inc.’s digital asset division. Cowen and PolySign have integrated PolySign’s next-generation digital banking technology into Cowen’s innovative, non-conflicted sales and trading platform. These advances have enabled PolySign to provide institutional investors with secure, compliant access to the multi-trillion dollar digital asset market.

17

In February 2022, Standard Custody and Trust Co. announced that it is a member of The United States Travel Universal Solution Technology (“TRUST”), implementing an industry-lead solution for digital assets. The group comprises over 18 U.S. Virtual Asset Service Providers with the mission of collaborating to develop and maintain compliance under The Travel Rule. TRUST, now live in the U.S. and soon globally, was designed to overcome the challenges of applying the Travel Rule to virtual currency transactions while ensuring the security and privacy of customer information and other sensitive data. The Travel Rule requires financial institutions, including non-bank institutions, to share information about their customers when sending funds to another financial institution above a certain dollar amount.

18

In November 2021, Standard Custody and Trust Co. announced secure custody and staking support for Solana (SOL) tokens, making it one of the first NYDFS-licensed qualified custodians to provide institutional investors with the ability to interact directly with the Solana network.

19

Standard Custody’s highly-secure, regulated and insured custody gives institutions the power to control segregated, on-chain accounts, and through a partnership with staking services provider Figment, a uniquely safe and convenient solution for owning and staking Solana tokens.

20

In February 2024, Ripple announced that it has agreed to acquire Standard Custody & Trust Company, an enterprise-grade regulated platform for digital assets. This move further underscores Ripple's commitment to regulatory compliance and enables the company to strengthen its existing product offerings, as well as explore new, complementary products. “Ripple and Standard Custody are dedicated to enabling enterprises to reap the benefits of blockchain across a host of financial use cases building institutional-grade solutions to tokenize, store, move, and exchange value. By expanding our licenses portfolio and making smart acquisitions, Ripple is well-positioned to take advantage of the current market opportunities and further strengthen our crypto infrastructure solutions,” said Monica Long, Ripple President. “We will continue to leverage our strong financial standing to expand our product offerings, support new initiatives on the product roadmap and serve a broader segment of customers.”

Industry

Primary Vertical

FinTech

Mosaic Score

100

Money - 100

Momentum - 100

Management - 100

Market - 100

What is a Mosaic Score?

Employees: 500


Key Officers

Name Work History Title Status
officer name 1 Founder Current
officer name 2 Founder Current
officer name 3 Founder Current

Customers

Businesses that accept or are transitioning to accept bitcoin payments. Customers that own or trade cryptocurrency

Key Investors

Businesses that accept or are transitioning to accept bitcoin payments. Customers that own or trade cryptocurrency

Size of Market

Businesses that accept or are transitioning to accept bitcoin payments. Customers that own or trade cryptocurrency

Market Position

Businesses that accept or are transitioning to accept bitcoin payments. Customers that own or trade cryptocurrency

Valuation & Fundraising

Last Round: Jan. 2021, Seed

Valuation Post-Money: $10M

 

Amount Raised: $1M

Total Funds Raised: $10M

 

Linqto Implied Valuation: $10M


Funding Rounds

Date Round Amount Valuation
01/01/2021 Seed $11M $11M
01/01/2021 Seed $11M $11M
01/01/2021 Seed $11M $11M

Valuation Over Time

Linqto Chart

1 buyback

Competitive Landscape

Company Valuation Revenue

Company Name

San Francisco, California

$65.3B $1.3B

Company Name

San Francisco, California

$65.3B $1.3B

Company Name

San Francisco, California

$65.3B $1.3B

Company Name

San Francisco, California

$65.3B $1.3B