Google previewed a crypto custody service that splits the private key

Google showed Google Multi-Party Compute at its first digital assets symposium in New York on 28 October. The service splits a private key into shares that sit in separate environments: one on a bank's own servers, one in Google Cloud, one with a competing cloud provider. No machine holds the whole key, and Google says it never sees a share in unencrypted form. Each transfer passes a policy engine inside Confidential Space first, which checks it against the institution's own rules: spending limits, destination restrictions, a second department's approval.

The product sits in private preview. Google plans to sell it from early 2027 and has not published pricing, named the institutions testing it, or said what approval thresholds those institutions chose. Alphabet runs its own Ethereum and Solana holdings on the service and did not say how much that is. Google Cloud updated the documentation for the service on the Monday before the symposium, and its release notes go back to August.

“Digital asset adoption and tokenization are at an inflection point.”

— Rich Widmann, director of digital assets strategy at Google Cloud, https://cointelegraph.com/news/google-cloud-mpc-service-bitcoin-custody

The threat it names, counted

Google says the current protections cover compromised credentials and unauthorized transactions. TRM Labs counted a record 207 hacks in the first half of 2026 and $972m taken, and the way it splits that total shows which half of the problem Google picked.

• Infrastructure compromises: about 15% of the incidents and about 76% of the money, which is roughly $739m across some 31 attacks. Two North Korea-linked operations against Drift Protocol and KelpDAO took $577m of that, leaving around $162m for the rest.
• Smart contract exploits: 125 of the 207 incidents, with a median loss of $219,000.

The category Google is selling into holds three quarters of the money and a sixth of the incidents. Its commercial version arrives in early 2027, a year after the half-year TRM counted. Thresholds like two of three are configurable, and Google has not said which ones the institutions in the preview settled on.

Splitting the key does not touch what happens around it. An approval policy written badly approves bad transfers, the parties holding the shares can agree with one another, and a bug in the signing software signs whatever it is handed. The preview signs with ECDSA and Ed25519, and Google says it can add post-quantum cryptography later without banks rebuilding.

The market it walks into

Google named Fireblocks and BitGo as the crypto custody services it competes with. Bloomberg reported on 22 October that Visa was in talks to buy Fireblocks at around $2.5bn, roughly a third of the $8bn the company was worth in 2022. Fireblocks called the report untrue, and Calcalist reported the next day that it would cut about 7% of its staff, 60 to 70 jobs out of roughly 900.

Google's MPC architecture has run with Anchorage Digital, a federally chartered crypto bank, since 2025, and Gemini Custody moved its institutional accounts to MPC starting 8 October. Google Cloud Universal Ledger, the company's tokenized-deposit blockchain, named Jack Henry as an integration partner on 16 October. The symposium's speaker list came from Morgan Stanley, OKX, Citi and Wells Fargo, the kind of customer Google means when it says banks, and the kind that reported a breach of its own three weeks ago.

Informational material, not investment advice. The product details are as Google Cloud documented them and as reporters described the symposium on 28 October 2026. The hack figures are TRM Labs' first-half tally, the Fireblocks valuation and layoff numbers come from Bloomberg and Calcalist, and the shares of money and incidents, along with the gap between the count and the launch, are our own arithmetic.