CoinDesk reported on October 28, 2026, that financial institutions were testing Google Cloud’s Multi-Party Compute in a private preview and that Alphabet had begun using it for unspecified digital assets on Ethereum and Solana. Google labels the service Preview. Its transaction policies can stop automatic signing, but enough authorized signers can still approve a transfer after a policy denial.
How Google Cloud MPC distributes signing authority
Multi-Party Compute (MPC) lets separate parties use key shares to produce a digital-asset signature. Google says its service uses threshold signing, meaning a specified number of participants must take part. The full private signing key is not assembled in one place.
Google’s product overview says a KeyPolicy defines which teams and users hold shares, how many must participate, and where shares are stored: in Google Cloud, on customer premises, or on users’ mobile devices. Google lists Admin, Policy Author, and Signer roles. The private halves of the authorization keys used by those roles remain in customer custody.
Google describes Multi-Party Compute as a Preview, or pre-general-availability, service. Its Pre-GA offerings may have limited support and are provided as is.
What a policy denial actually means
Google’s transaction policies use Cedar permit-or-forbid rules. A transaction is denied by default if no permit rule matches, and a matching forbid rule takes precedence. A DENY result stops automatic signing, but it does not prevent enough authorized signers from approving the transaction under the KeyPolicy. The policy evaluation record stays attached for auditing.
That makes the policy a guardrail for automatic signing, not an absolute veto. The distinction matters to organizations deciding how much authority to give individual signers and how to handle transactions that trigger a rule.
A limited sample of comments associated with a video discussion welcomed institutional crypto infrastructure, while other commenters questioned Google’s trustworthiness or worried about institutional control over crypto. Those reactions are not a technical assessment. The episode is sponsored by Tangem, and its Google custody segment begins at 00:48.
A Bitcoin transaction the policy may not evaluate
Google’s policy documentation says a Bitcoin transaction with several recipients may be treated as an unrecognized payload. In that case, the transaction may be denied without policy evaluation. For organizations relying on rules to assess transaction details, this is a relevant format limitation: the rules may not run on that payload.
Supported networks and the reported commercial target
Google lists ECDSA/secp256k1 support for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and EVM-compatible chains. Its overview marks EdDSA/Ed25519 support for Solana as “coming soon.” CoinDesk separately reported Alphabet’s use of the service for unspecified Solana assets; that report does not change the status shown in Google’s overview.
Google labels the service Preview. CoinDesk reported a plan for commercial availability in early 2027, a target rather than a completed launch.
