Fireblocks just announced that it has acquired stablecoin and digital asset payments technology platform First Digital. This new acquisition will help support and grow their payments offering by allowing payment service providers (PSPs) and acquirers to accept payments and make payouts in digital currencies.
Retail payments and services represent one of the fastest growing categories in the digital asset space. According to research from Mastercard, 40% of consumers in the Americas, Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East, and Africa plan to use digital assets to make purchases over the next year. Moreover, 93% of survey respondents are considering using a cutting-edge method of transaction settlement for crypto payments.
Due to this rising consumer demand, payment service providers and merchants are actively seeking ways to support crypto and digital asset payments, but they’re often confronted with high wallet integration costs, manual KYC/AML screening, and the complexity of timely acceptance of new blockchain payment types.
Taking Digital Payments to the Next Level
In the past, Fireblocks has partnered with First Digital to facilitate both peer-to-peer and peer-to-merchant transactions, with the goal of lowering overhead costs for financial service providers, merchants, and customers.
By embedding First Digital into the Fireblocks tech stack, we are broadening our support for B2C, B2B, cross-border, and other forms of payment via USDC, Celo, and other stablecoins and cryptocurrencies as early as Spring 2022. The acquisition of First Digital will significantly expand Fireblocks’ payments offering, creating a suite of tools that integrates digital asset treasury operations with day-to-day financial activities.
“We’re thrilled to welcome First Digital to the Fireblocks family as we accelerate our expansion plans to help every business become a crypto business. We’re pushing ‘fast forward’ to give PSPs the suite of tools they need to begin accepting crypto payments.”Michael Shaulov, CEO and Co-Founder of Fireblocks
The acquisition of First Digital is another important step in Fireblocks’ growth plan. Who recently completed a $550 million Series E funding round that raised our valuation to $8 billion, making Fireblocks the highest-valued digital asset infrastructure provider in the world.
New Digital Payment Expertise
First Digital has extensive experience in facilitating digital asset payments, and the company will lead the integration between First’s Payments Platform and the Fireblocks Direct Custody Platform. First Digital was founded in 2017 and has been a leader in providing API-based stablecoin payment solutions, with turnkey implementation of transaction and treasury management, and compliance. Through First Digital, merchants who work with supported PSPs can simply add an option to accept crypto payments, and the funds are settled in either local currency or crypto.
The First Digital engineering team will be joining Fireblocks’ own engineering staff, adding their deep knowledge and expertise in the payments space to our growing tech stack. As part of the integration, Ran Goldi, the CEO of First Digital, has also been appointed Vice President of Payments at Fireblocks.
“It is amazing to see what the entire Fireblocks team has built and accomplished in such a short period of time. This is an exciting opportunity for the First Digital team based on a proven, successful partnership with Fireblocks. We believe that payments should be a core functionality for all fintech apps, and via Fireblocks’ platform, we will make it available to the world at scale.” Ran Goldi, CEO of First Digital
Image by Julius Drost on Unsplash
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