Google Previews Multi-Party Compute Crypto Custody for Banks, With Solana Support Coming Soon

Google is previewing Google Multi-Party Compute, a custody service that lets banks hold and move crypto and tokenized assets without any single machine ever holding a complete private key. The product is in private preview with several unnamed design partners and financial institutions, and Google plans to make it commercially available in early 2027, the company told CoinDesk. Alphabet, Google's parent company, has also begun using the system to secure its own digital assets on Ethereum and Solana, according to the same report.

Google presented the product at its first MPC symposium, held on 28 October 2026 at Pier 57 in New York, where the event page promised an "exclusive revealing of Google's frontier MPC product." Google's own product documentation, last updated on 27 October 2026, lists Solana as the target chain for the service's Ed25519 signing, marked "coming soon."

Google Multi-Party Compute and Solana: what Google has said

Google Multi-Party Compute supports two signature types. ECDSA covers Bitcoin, Ethereum and other EVM chains, and carries no "coming soon" label in Google's documentation. EdDSA on the Ed25519 curve, the signature scheme Solana wallets use, is listed against Solana as "coming soon" in Google's supported-blockchains table. Google told CoinDesk the service is designed to support both ECDSA and Ed25519 at general availability.

Google's release notes show Curve25519 key generation and signing added on 20 August 2026, and distributed Schnorr signatures with standard Ed25519 hashing added on 1 October 2026. The same notes show the preview shipping updates since August, two months before the New York reveal.

Two things are missing. Google did not say which assets Alphabet holds or how much, and it did not name the institutions testing the service. The two statements also sit awkwardly together: the public docs still mark Solana "coming soon," while Google told CoinDesk Alphabet has begun using the system on Solana. Google has not explained the gap.

How Google's MPC custody splits a private key

Multi-party computation, or MPC, replaces one private key with several key shares held by separate parties. To sign a transaction, enough of those parties run a joint protocol that produces a valid signature without the full key ever being assembled. Google's docs say the service uses a hardened extension of the DKLS23 threshold-signing protocol, and that an attacker who compromises fewer parties than the signing threshold cannot forge a signature.

The closest everyday comparison is a bank vault that needs two of three managers to turn their keys at once, except the keys here are maths and no one ever holds the whole combination.

In practice, CoinDesk's example has a bank keeping one share in Google Cloud, one on its own hardware and one with a rival cloud provider. Thresholds such as two-of-three or five-of-seven are supported. Google's documentation adds that shares can also live on users' mobile devices, and that customers organise signers into teams, so a policy can say "any two of three Treasury officers."

Before signing, transactions are checked against written rules: spending limits, allowlists of destination addresses, and approvals from several departments. CoinDesk reports those checks run inside Confidential Space, Google's hardware-isolated computing environment. One detail from the docs is easy to miss: a policy verdict "guides Signers but doesn't enforce the final decision," so a transaction the rules deny can still go through if enough signers approve it.

Google says customers keep control of their key material and that it cannot read key shares in unencrypted form, even when they sit on Google's infrastructure.

Rich Widmann, director of digital assets strategy at Google Cloud, told CoinDesk that "digital asset adoption and tokenization are at an inflection point," adding that regulated institutions "need scalable, proven infrastructure to secure their clients' assets."

Google Cloud vs Fireblocks, Fordefi and BitGo

Google has not previously offered a dedicated MPC custody product for crypto, according to CoinDesk. Its existing key services, Cloud KMS and Cloud HSM, store and protect keys, while the new service bundles MPC signing, transaction policies and key recovery for digital assets. In 2023 Google published guidance on how customers could build such systems themselves on Confidential Space.

That puts Google up against specialist custody-technology firms such as Fireblocks, Fordefi and BitGo. Google pitches itself as neutral infrastructure for banks that are wary of vendors competing for the same clients, and points to its banking relationships and security record. Cointelegraph, reporting separately, noted the documentation leans toward institutional Bitcoin custody, with Bitcoin-specific policy rules added on 1 October.

CoinDesk also set out the limits. Banks would still depend on Google for software, policies and operations; security depends on how institutions configure approval rules; a legitimate signer tricked into approving a bad transaction remains a risk; and Google offered no independently verified performance comparison with existing custody products.

What Google's custody service means for banks on Solana

Custody is the step that decides whether a regulated bank can hold an on-chain asset at all. Solana's institutional pipeline has grown through 2026: Clearstream added SOL to its regulated crypto custody in July, JPMorgan Chase's asset management arm brought its MONY and JLTXX tokenized money market funds to Solana on 22 October, and Mirae Asset Securities issued tokenized funding notes on Solana on 28 October. None of those firms has been linked to Google's service, and the connection here is our reading rather than anything Google reported.

The Solana-specific facts are narrow but concrete. One of the world's largest cloud providers is building bank-grade custody that names Solana in its supported-chains table, and Google says its parent company has begun using it for assets on Solana. The things to watch before the planned early 2027 launch are the date Solana signing leaves "coming soon," the names of the design partners, and pricing, none of which Google has published.