The Rising Demand for Crypto Services from Traditional Enterprises

The Long Road to Crypto Mass Adoption

The last two years or so saw major changes occur in the traditional financial world. We saw traditional banking giants such as Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs formally take the plunge into the crypto space by offering their clients a variety of crypto-based investment products. Goldman, for example, began trading Bitcoin-linked derivatives. We also saw other players such as Cowen, Inc. offer crypto custodial services to its clients. In more recent news, JPMorgan and Visa, two globally recognized mainstays of the financial world, also entered the crypto space by offering trading, investment, and settlement services using cryptocurrencies.

While these are major developments, these institutions must understand that the road ahead is fraught with risks, and there are many challenges that they will need to overcome if they are to succeed in the DeFi space.

Overcoming Challenges

While the entry of these institutional players to the DeFi space is welcome, the challenge of integrating traditional finance with decentralized finance cannot be overlooked.

There are several mission-critical operational risks to cryptocurrency trade and investment that traditional financial institutions must overcome before they can safely and cost-effectively provide crypto services to their clients. These include:

• Client onboarding
• Developing and rolling out user-friendly apps custom-built for crypto trade
• Providing users with insight into wallets crypto holdings
• Gathering data on investment opportunities and returns
• Developing private key custody services and transaction signing technology
• Blockchain governance
• Third-party APIs and integrations
• Wallet and network maintenance services

The importance of each of the above should be clear. Without seamless onboarding of clients (as well as clear messaging), it will be difficult for banks to convince their clients to invest in the crypto space. Without user-friendly apps, banks will find that they are failing at client retention and customer service expenses will likely rise. Without data on investment opportunities, it can be difficult to know where funds should be allocated.

Similarly, without private key custody and transaction signing technology, user funds will never be fully secure. And without blockchain governance, maintenance, and APIs/integrations, it can be next to impossible for traditional financial institutions to connect the myriad players involved in trade — brokers, exchanges, clearinghouses, lending companies, and more — to execute trades or provide other services.

There is a very steep learning curve involved with understanding how to provide decentralized financial services to your customers and then building the networks, infrastructure, integrations, and partnerships required to roll out new services successfully, not to mention the training of personnel and users, all of which can take months, if not longer. There are costs associated with “missing the boat,” and financial institutions that are late to the game may find themselves forever trying to catch up to the organizations that more quickly or more effectively overcame the challenges above and were quicker to market with new, value-generating products.

Introducing Unido

This is the perfect storm for which Unido was built. We are currently at a critical time in the evolution and development of the DeFi and fintech spaces, and there is surging demand for services that few understand, accompanied by a pressing need to quickly enter the market.

Unido is an enterprise-grade suite of financial services products that help businesses bridge the decentralized and the traditional financial worlds. It comes as a fully functional, plug-n-play solution that helps businesses and individuals tap into the DeFi space without requiring any technical know-how. It can be used as a white-label product to provide DeFi services to your existing client base.

Custom-built for decentralized capital markets, Unido helps exchanges, custodial services, lending companies, startups, end-users, and enterprise financial institutions such as banks and hedge funds enter the DeFi space and interact with or provide their clients with a wide variety of DeFi products.

Some of the key offerings of the platform are as follows.

Unido Enterprise Platform (EP): An application to help crypto-native firms and asset management firms seamlessly and securely manage their assets while remaining compliant with relevant licensing and regulatory requirements. The EP provides insights into the wallets, customers, and assets of the firm — all in one place — helping to empower better, smarter, more streamlined crypto-asset investment, management, trade, and operations.

Unido Institutional: A full-stack cryptocurrency bank-in-a-box that functions as a stand-alone bank. It can be integrated with legacy systems and centralized CRMs, and it offers financial services companies the ability to offer crypto banking facilities similar to those provided by traditional bank accounts.

Unido Vault: An enterprise-grade custodial wallet service that provides a secure and integrated bridge to a wide range of DeFi investments.

Unido Core: This is Unido’s proprietary key management and transaction signing technology that delivers flexible governance, enterprise-grade security, and cross-chain interoperability.

Unido already has significant traction and a growing user base for these products. For example, EQI Bank, often referred to as the world’s digital bank, recently partnered with Unido for a custom version of Unido Institutional, and many more partnerships and alliances are currently in development.

Additional Utility

The partnerships mentioned above come with another benefit built into the Unido ecosystem. Unido’s native token, UDO, is a utility token that is the gateway to all platforms and services. However, thanks to UDO’s deflationary tokenomics, platform revenues are used to buy back and burn tokens from the open market. In this way, the UDO token’s value will scale in line with the implementation of solutions. As the ecosystem grows, so does token value.

Final Thoughts

One of the biggest reasons businesses and projects fail — whether in the DeFi world or the traditional financial world — is poor implementation. There are major benefits to offload the handling of the sensitive blockchain and cryptographic functions around which DeFi services are built to a world-class organization such as Unido that is built by industry experts and provides enterprise-grade solutions to business concerns of all sizes.

With Unido, you can focus on your business and avoid the steep and costly learning curves and delays associated with reinventing the wheel and building tech stacks and infrastructure from scratch. With quick, plug-n-play deployment, guaranteed security, enterprise-grade services, unmatched interoperability, and seamless, intuitive user interfaces, Unido is creating financial bridges and closing gaps to revolutionize the way we view and approach DeFi and institutional finance.

Learn more about the project by visiting https://www.unido.us/.