Beyond Crypto Custody: Fireblocks Unveils Web3 Engine To Support DeFi, Games And NFTs

Blockchain infrastructure provider Fireblocks has launched a suite of developer tools and a portal for customers to access cryptocurrency exchanges, NFT marketplaces and other decentralized applications across multiple networks.

Revealed exclusively to Forbes, the features are part of the company’s new offering called Web3 engine, which also includes custody services, treasury management, risk mitigation tools and a tokenization mechanism for managing the whitelisting, minting, burning and transfer of NFTs. Additionally, it gives institutions access to platforms like OpenSea, Rarible, Uniswap and dYdX directly from the Fireblocks console.

The company has already onboarded a few high-profile clients for the service. Among them are Animoca Brands, Stardust, MoonPay, Xternity Games, Griffin Gaming, Wirex, Celsius and Utopian Game Labs.

“The goal is to essentially bring all the security arsenal and capabilities that we’ve built for empowering financial firms to operate with crypto to this new group of players,” says Michael Shaulov, Fireblocks’ CEO and cofounder.

The New York-based startup is serving about 1,200 institutions including exchanges, banks, lending and trading desks and hedge funds helping them move, store and issue cryptocurrencies. Fireblocks claims it has secured the transfer of over $2.5 trillion in digital assets.

But the scope of its services has been increasingly expanding beyond institutional-grade custody. Last month, the firm partnered with FIS, a publicly-traded $62 billion fintech company that offers everything from payments services to wealth management, to provide FIS’ 6,000+ capital markets clients access to a full suite of crypto trading and lending services.

Around the same time, as part of its early access program to the Web3 engine, Fireblocks added support for decentralized finance applications (dapps) on the Terra blockchain. The network underpins the troubled stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) and its sister token LUNA, both of which collapsed to nearly $0 last week.

According to Shaulov, in less than a month Fireblocks’ customers had transferred around $3 billion in volume across the platform interacting with Terra’s popular dapps such as lending protocol Anchor, staking platform Lido and peer-to-peer exchange Astroport. But once UST, designed to always be worth $1, lost its peg, Fireblocks saw mainly “transactional activity that was speculative in nature as people were trying to hedge or take advantage of the situation,” says Shaulov. He highlights that ultimately Terra is only one of the 35+ networks Fireblocks’ Web3 engine supports (others include popular networks like Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche): “the goal of this offering is to provide cross-blockchain support.”

The engine is the latest product providing users with gateways to easily interact with the $90 billion DeFi industry. Yesterday, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase introduced a similar capability for its retail users, enabling them to access Ethereum-based applications directly from the Coinbase app. This includes buying NFTs on marketplaces like Coinbase NFT and OpenSea, trading on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and Sushiswap, and borrowing and lending through DeFi platforms like Curve and Compound.

Editor’s note: the story was updated to reflect Utopian Game Labs as one of Fireblocks’ clients, not Utopian Labs as was previously stated in the press release.