Crypto-as-a-Service

TLDR: BitGo’s Crypto-as-a-Service product provides businesses, banks and fintechs the building blocks to offer their clients crypto functionalities and tap into new revenue streams. By leveraging BitGo’s regulatory licensing and modular APIs and webbooks, BitGo clients can get their crypto products to market quickly and compliantly.

Why is building crypto functionalities important?

Embracing crypto functionality enables organizations to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving financial landscape. For many businesses like fintechs, payments providers, large banks, and especially legacy tech companies, plugging into the crypto economy has become table stakes for any forward looking company. 

Onboarding users into crypto can look like a lot of things, such as offering crypto trading, payments, or embedded wallets directly within your platform. In fact, many implementations give users access to products without them ever knowing that they are interacting with another provider. This isn’t meant to be a ruse, but simply an abstraction of the complex technology powering the offering.

Whether it is meeting the evolving needs of a modern user base or leveraging blockchain technology to optimize internal operations, businesses can now lean into crypto to create new revenue streams and take their business to the next level.

Crypto ain’t easy

Accessing the blockchain can be a challenging task, and also comes with additional technical and regulatory complexities. Although the industry has been around for over 15 years, crypto is still a relatively new and complex technology with several barriers to entry. These challenges are exactly where a Crypto-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform comes into play.

Technical complexity/Blockchain expertise

Problem: Developing and maintaining a secure, scalable, and efficient crypto infrastructure requires specialized knowledge and substantial resources, which many organizations may lack. 

Solution: CaaS solutions provide ready-made platforms with plug-and-play APIs that simplify the development process, allowing businesses to offer crypto services without lengthy and extensive in-house development.

Licensing and regulatory compliance

Problem: It’s no secret that the cryptocurrency landscape is continually evolving, with quickly changing and varying regulations across jurisdictions. Navigating these legal complexities can be daunting and feel risky for businesses. 

Solution: CaaS providers often offer the ability to leverage licensing and regulatory approvals that can be utilized by the CaaS customer. This allows businesses to lean on the provider’s licensing, passing on the regulatory risk and avoiding extremely long and expensive application processes. This is very similar to the popular Banking-as-a-Service business model that has brought impressive innovation to the fintech space. 

Additionally, CaaS providers incorporate compliance tools, such as Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) protocols, ensuring that businesses adhere to legal standards while minimizing the risk of penalties.

Public sentiment around crypto security concerns

Problem: Crypto has had no shortage of bad press regarding the safety of the technology, and the industry as a whole. 

Solution: CaaS platforms offer robust security measures, including secure wallets and transaction monitoring, to protect against fraud and cyber threats. Additionally, trusted CaaS partners with spotless track records give businesses and consumers the confidence that their funds will remain safe.

Wallets are the foundation. Trading and staking are the frame.

The base layer of integrating crypto functionalities into any type of business or app, is wallet infrastructure. In order to interact with anything onchain, whether you are holding, buying, selling, or transferring assets, you and your users will need secure embedded wallets. 

Wallet configurations can look very different depending on the use case, with any combination of both hot and cold, custody and self-custody wallets. However, relying on trusted and battle-tested wallet infrastructure is paramount to instill confidence in your product with your end users. 

Tip: The most secure and reliable wallets to offer are custodial wallets with robust sub-accounting ensuring accuracy and auditability.

The building blocks to create your vision

When building a business, no one wants to build a 4000-piece Death Star. Especially when implementing complex technology like crypto APIs, the goal is a smooth path to a fully functioning end product as fast as possible, with as much out of the box as possible.

BitGo has created a suite of APIs and webhooks that make it super simple to integrate and get fully operational services within a few weeks. The APIs are engineered to make it intuitive to leverage which “blocks” you want to leverage and piece together for the optimal use case for your use case.

Using BitGo, you can easily implement the following functionality into your business:

• Regulatory Licensing: Skip the painful process of acquiring your own licenses by leveraging BitGo’s regulated entities

• Fast KYC: Seamlessly submit and approve users through rapid KYC and onboarding flows

• Wallet Infrastructure: Robust custodial hot and cold wallet infrastructure that integrates digital assets and fiat natively

• On/off ramps: Seamless connection between traditional banking and crypto ecosystems

• Trade: Empower your users to trade the top cryptocurrency pairs within your own UI

• Transfer: Offer instant transfers of all supported assets without leaving BitGo’s custody

• Staking: Enable secure staking to offer your users predictable rewards

• Policy Controls: Customizable policy engine to enforce user permissions, spending limits, and other safeguards to protect your organization and your users

• Insurance: With BitGo’s custodial wallets, all client funds are insured up to $250m

• 24/7 Support: Receive dedicated account management and technical guidance with 24/7 global customer support

These building blocks can be used in isolation or in any combination, depending on the use case. For example, leveraging BitGo’s licensing is the best way to get to market fast. However, for businesses with their own regulatory licensing, leveraging secure wallet infrastructure and BitGo’s trading APIs may be the perfect combination of modules to offer end users an ultra-secture crypto trading function. 

Build with BitGo

The wonderful part of BitGo’s CaaS offering is that BitGo truly is a stop shop for all things crypto. BitGo is a regulated custodian with a long track record of security and innovation. As a regulated custodian, BitGo brings an ultra-secure wallet infrastructure, the base layer of interacting with anything onchain, and combines it with robust security measures, institutional-grade insurance policies, client-obsessed customer service, and an extensive network of market markers and liquidity providers working behind the scenes. Building a business using BitGo as the foundation has never been easier or safer. 

Get in touch to learn more about how you can take advantage of the crypto economy.