The Vault Opens Tbilisi Engineering Hub Through Local Arm Tría Labs

An engineering base between Zug and Limassol

The Vault, the Swiss and EU regulated custody platform for institutional digital assets, has opened a new engineering hub in Tbilisi, Georgia. The move runs through Tría Labs, the company's local Georgian entity, which will house the developers and cryptographers who build the platform's core technology, working in close step with existing offices in Zug, Switzerland, and Limassol, Cyprus. Both offices keep their roles: Zug remains the Swiss anchor and Limassol the European one. Chief executive Artem Stopnevich framed the choice as a matter of giving the people who create the firm's technology the best possible base, describing Tbilisi as a place where the team can settle for the long term. What the announcement does not spell out is any headcount, budget or hiring figure beyond a start window of the coming months. The engineering mandate itself is concrete. From Tbilisi, the team will continue to advance the firm's proprietary multi-party computation library, independently audited by the security firm Halborn this year, together with the software-as-a-service and on-premise deployments used by banks, asset managers and fintech firms to keep client assets safe. MPC, as the technique is known, splits the private key that controls a wallet address across several parties, so that no single operator or compromised server can move institutional funds on its own. That distinction shapes how clients treat the service. Custody of this kind is built around segregation and controls at the wallet address level, whereas assets left on a crypto exchange sit within the venue's own balance-sheet arrangements. The regulated side of the business rests on two entities: Tría Bridge Ltd, authorised by CySEC as a crypto-asset service provider under MiCA with licence 013/24, and SwissZeit Capital AG, a member of the VQF self-regulatory organisation in Switzerland.

Licences stay, engineering moves

Georgia sits at the centre of the company's location rationale. The country has become one of the livelier technology destinations between Europe and Asia, and it now attracts a fast-growing community of international engineers, which the firm presents as the core attraction of the site. The Vault frames the Tbilisi office as capacity rather than cost: room to scale product output at a moment when the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, known as MiCA, is accelerating institutional demand for regulated custody. MiCA sets a single rulebook for crypto-asset services across EU member states, and custody is among the activities it licenses directly, so a platform selling to banks, asset managers and fintechs needs engineering depth to keep pace with onboarding. For a regulated custodian, that demand translates into onboarding pipelines, client integrations and continuous security work, all of which consume engineering capacity rather than sales effort. The practical groundwork in Georgia is still moving. Banking, tax and employment structures are being settled, and the first specialists are due to start in Tbilisi over the coming months. The company has not stated a headcount target for the hub or an investment figure, leaving the scale of the build-out open. The division of responsibilities is deliberate. Licensed activity stays with The Vault's regulated entities in Cyprus and Switzerland; the new office is devoted purely to research and product development. That separation keeps CySEC supervision of client-facing services anchored in Limassol and VQF oversight in Switzerland, where those mandates were granted, and leaves the Georgian entity outside the licensed perimeter for now. The Vault, for context, is an institutional digital asset infrastructure platform providing MPC-based custody technology and regulated services to financial institutions. Nothing in the announcement adds a retail service line: the counterparties described are financial institutions.

The shape of this expansion says more about MiCA-era operations than about any hire. Licences stay anchored where supervisors granted them, in Cyprus and Switzerland, while engineering capacity is sourced in a market with a deepening talent pool and no licensed function attached. The demand side is broadening as well: in our reading, custody mandates under the EU framework increasingly stretch from native digital assets to tokenized real-world assets, which multiplies the integration work falling on the same engineering bench. Two questions remain open: eventual headcount and cost. Stopnevich's statement stands as the company's last word on the location: “Tbilisi offers exactly that: an open, talented and rapidly growing tech scene, and a city where our team can settle for the long term. We are delighted to become part of it.”