Institutional DeFi Yield Moves Inside BitGo Custody

POLAND - 2023/11/14: In this photo illustration, a DeFi logo is displayed on a smartphone with stock market percentages in the background. (Photo Illustration by Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images "Realistically the risk reward just has not been there," said Nic Roberts-Huntley, co-founder and chief executive of Blueprint Finance, on the On The Margin podcast, describing why large institutions have mostly stayed out of digital assets. The problem he describes is arithmetic. "I think what we've asked a lot of like institutional finance people who sit in their traditional roles and have very, very fixed practices is to say, you must change fundamentally what you do to get exposure to something that is just a fraction of the size of what you have," he said. "That doesn't make any sense whatsoever." Roberts-Huntley trained as a doctor in Britain and worked at the Royal Marsden cancer hospital before studying policy and economics at Oxford, moving to the Bay Area to write financial transaction monitoring software, and joining Point72 as a vice president. He left the hedge fund to start Blueprint, which was founded in 2022. His answer to the arithmetic is to stop asking institutions to change. "But I think it has to be a little bit more invisible," he said. "I think it has to be a little bit more subtle than perhaps we want it to be, because we all love what we do. But I do think it has to be subtle, complementary, and not necessarily disruptive." What invisible looks like On June 2, BitGo and Concrete, the vault product Blueprint builds, announced a platform that lets institutional clients earn on vetted onchain strategies while their assets stay in BitGo Bank & Trust custody. Concrete deploys synthetic representations of the custodied assets into those strategies. The client's coins never make the trip. "Institutions are looking for ways to access digital asset opportunities without compromising the controls, oversight, and custody standards they require," Mike Belshe, BitGo's chief executive and co-founder, said in the announcement. BitGo is what makes the trade legible to a risk committee. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange on January 22 at $18 a share and held roughly $104 billion for more than 1,500 institutional clients at the time of its listing. Roberts-Huntley describes it as "a publicly traded company which has a banking license." The precise version is narrower and it is the whole point: BitGo Bank & Trust is a federally chartered, non-depository national trust bank, an Office of the Comptroller of the Currency charter for holding other people's assets, not for taking deposits. The OCC finalized the rule letting national trust banks do non-fiduciary custody work in February, effective April 1. "They have over a hundred billion dollars of assets," Roberts-Huntley said, and Concrete can "tap into that now relatively seamlessly." The custodian is the only door Nirup Ramalingam, chief executive of BridgePort, said on the On The Margin podcast that keeping assets with the custodian is not a preference for these firms. "We know the next wave of capital that's going to come from TradFi asset managers and hedge funds will not pre-fund," he said. "And in fact some in the US cannot pre-fund because of regulations. So they have to hold their assets with the qualified custodian." Ramalingam builds the settlement middleware between exchanges and custodians and reaches for a fintech comparison. "Bridgeport is the plaid for crypto," he said. That constraint explains the shape of the product. Nothing about it asks a compliance officer to approve a new venue, a new wallet or a new counterparty. The numbers, his and everyone else's Blueprint came out of stealth in February 2024 with $7.5 million led by Hashed and Tribe Capital, then raised $9.5 million more in June 2025 led by Polychain Capital, with YZi Labs, VanEck, Bitpanda Ventures and Gate Ventures. DefiLlama put Concrete's total value locked at about $855 million this week, up from the $650 million its investors cited a year ago. Roberts-Huntley's own figures are larger and unaudited. He says the first products went live on December 23, 2024, and "we're very fortunate to get about $1.2 billion in deposits within 45 days." He says the firm is "pretty soon to eclipse about a hundred billion dollars in transaction volume" and holds "around a billion dollars of committed capital," a measure that is not the same as the deposits DefiLlama tracks. He also says capital contributions are "up at around eight hundred and fifty percent" since October 2025, a period in which bitcoin fell by roughly half. That 45-day rush also coincided with something less flattering than institutional trust. In December 2024 Concrete was running pre-deposit vaults with Ethena and Lombard, ahead of Berachain's mainnet launch the following February, at a moment when depositors across crypto were chasing points and incentives rather than accounting quality. His own explanation is simpler. "When you make the nexus of what you can do on chain so broad and so complicated, people kind of get like choice paralysis," he said. Concrete's pitch is one deposit and a share that can be redeemed later. He credits growth to "a lot of the non-obvious and less interesting or less exciting reasons that we're really good at security and we're really good at accounting." The investor on both sides of the table The two firms were already connected. BitGo is listed among the investors in Blueprint's June 2025 round, a year before the two announced the custody partnership. Neither announcement mentions the relationship. BitGo has since done versions of the same deal with others. A week after the Concrete launch, it plugged in Spark, the Sky sub-DAO whose savings product does the same job for idle stablecoins , and it later extended the model to Aave and Tesseract. The custodian is assembling a shelf of yield suppliers, and it holds equity in at least one of them. What is inside the vault The strategies themselves are not passive. Roberts-Huntley describes taking deposits to blue-chip money markets, "collateralize the assets we receive and then with the stable coins that we raise in the form of debt, those are then allocated through our strategy management framework into various opportunities across DeFi and on-chain activity." Deposits are borrowed against, and the borrowings are put to work. Washington has started looking directly at this. On July 22, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce warned that vaults whose managers pick strategies, rebalance assets and appoint decision-makers may not sit outside securities law. "Tokenized securities are still securities. That principle holds for vaults," she said. "If you do headstands, backflips and other gymnastics to read the law so that it does not apply to crypto assets and activities that are well within the scope of the federal securities laws, you will have a painful fall." The category she was describing held $8.6 billion across 788 curated vaults, according to data from Vaults.fyi. Morpho's token fell about 5% on the statement. The failure case is recent. On November 4, 2025, Stream Finance disclosed that an external manager had lost $93 million of platform assets. Its yield token xUSD fell from $1 to about 26 cents within a day, and because it had been accepted as collateral elsewhere, roughly $285 million of interconnected debt across lending markets went bad with it. That episode arrived weeks before DeFi's yield layer was rebuilt and months before Aave's own bad debt crisis in April. None of those losses were visible to a depositor reading a vault's headline yield. Vault shares as mortgage paper Roberts-Huntley's ambition runs further than custody. "We actually want to build an entire function where we can make interest in opportunities, particularly our vaults, a fully tradable aspect," he said. The market he models it on is securitized mortgage debt. "It actually looks a lot like people moving mortgages around," he said, and what he wants to build is "this kind of paper network of interest in yield bearing opportunities, similar to how people move mortgages or structured debt instrumentation." Pieces of that exist. Pendle has run a secondary market in split onchain yield for years, and the tokenization of everything has already reached private company stock. Chan Ahn, chief executive of Tessera, said on the On The Margin podcast that his tokenized private shares trade continuously, "unlike traditional VC or key funds for users where you are subject to five-year lockup or very little secondary market availability, you can actually trade 24-7." What does not exist yet is depth, and Roberts-Huntley says so himself about the wider market. "It's one of the reasons that rates are compressed at the moment. Flows on chain are really thin," he said. Onchain stablecoin lending on the blue-chip venues currently pays roughly 2% to 6%, often less than the federal funds rate, which is the yield an institution can collect without leaving a Treasury fund. Not everyone wants the invisible version MacBrennan Peet, founder of Project 0, said on the On The Margin podcast that building for institutions is the wrong goal. "I'm actually very unfocused on institutions," he said. "I think if we just catered to institutions, DeFi, like we should just give up. Like I think the cool thing that DeFi enables is retail." The fight over who DeFi is for has been running all year. Roberts-Huntley is content to be dull. He expects "small but like meaningful adoption of controlled areas of risk exposure and digital assets, whether that be through banking rails, payments, or qualified custodians" this year, and he is not waiting on the market structure bill that stalled in the Senate in July. The market he wants is not quite built either. Tokenized equities trade around the clock on crypto-native venues such as Kraken's xStocks, while the New York Stock Exchange filed in January for a blockchain platform to trade continuously and Nasdaq has approval for a 23-hour day. What he keeps returning to is not a trading desk converted to crypto. It is a fund manager quietly moving risk off the books before the weekend. He describes "being able to sit on a Friday afternoon at a traditional long short hedge fund and perhaps selling risk into a weekend market in the form of digital assets in a regulated environment so that a chief compliance officer doesn't call you and tell you to reduce your exposure."