BitGo, a leading digital asset infrastructure company, today announced a groundbreaking integration with Narval that enables institutional clients to access decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols directly from BitGo’s qualified custody platform. The partnership addresses one of the most significant barriers to institutional DeFi adoption: the tension between security and accessibility.
The integration combines Narval’s advanced DeFi Gateway with BitGo’s established custody infrastructure, potentially opening the floodgates for billions in institutional capital to flow into onchain protocols.
Institutional DeFi Enters New Era
“Institutional DeFi is entering a new era of safety and scale,” said Chen Fang, Chief Revenue Officer at BitGo. The integration represents a significant milestone in bridging traditional finance’s compliance and security requirements with the innovative potential of decentralized protocols.
Historically, institutional investors have faced a difficult choice: maintain assets in secure cold storage and miss out on DeFi yield opportunities, or expose assets to additional risks by transferring them to hot wallets for protocol participation. This integration eliminates that trade-off by enabling DeFi participation without moving assets out of qualified custody.
The timing is particularly crucial as institutional interest in DeFi has accelerated throughout 2025, driven by attractive yields and maturing protocol infrastructure. However, security concerns and regulatory compliance requirements have kept many institutions on the sidelines.
Three-Pillar Security Architecture
Narval’s DeFi Gateway is built around three critical components designed to address institutional concerns:
DeFi Whitelisting Engine: This sophisticated system decodes and verifies every transaction to detect even subtle malicious changes. It provides an additional layer of protection against common attack vectors that have plagued DeFi protocols, including phishing attempts and parameter manipulation attacks.
Institutional Wallet Connector: Utilizing delegated authorization and trusted execution environments (TEEs), this component creates a secure bridge between decentralized applications and custodian APIs. The architecture ensures that institutions can interact with protocols without exposing private keys or compromising security protocols.
Dapp SDK: This provides embedded transaction user interfaces and real-time status updates, ensuring smooth and reliable execution while maintaining institutional control and visibility over all operations.
Expanded Institutional Capabilities
With this integration, institutional investors, foundations, and treasuries gain several key capabilities:
- Onchain financing participation: Institutions can now engage in lending and borrowing protocols while maintaining custody security
- Staking access: Direct participation in proof-of-stake networks without transferring assets to third-party providers
- Liquidity protocol engagement: Ability to provide liquidity to decentralized exchanges and earn yields
- Enhanced protection: Defense against phishing, blind-signing, and malicious parameter changes
- Real-time monitoring: Comprehensive transaction tracking and compliance reporting capabilities
The integration addresses multiple institutional concerns simultaneously, including security, compliance, and operational efficiency. By maintaining assets within qualified custody throughout the process, institutions can satisfy regulatory requirements while accessing DeFi opportunities.
Market Impact and Timing
The announcement comes at a pivotal moment for the DeFi ecosystem. Throughout 2025, the sector has seen renewed institutional interest as yields in traditional markets have compressed and DeFi protocols have matured significantly.
Total Value Locked (TVL) in DeFi protocols has grown steadily over the past year, reaching levels not seen since the 2021 bull market. However, institutional participation has remained limited due to security and compliance concerns. This integration could unlock substantial new capital inflows.
“Our mission is to make DeFi participation secure and seamless for institutions,” said Greg Jessner, CEO and Co-Founder of Narval. “By integrating with BitGo’s qualified custody, we’re ensuring that clients can access DeFi opportunities without compromising on compliance or security.”
Industry Implications
The BitGo-Narval partnership could serve as a blueprint for future institutional DeFi access solutions. As more custodians and infrastructure providers develop similar integrations, the institutional barriers to DeFi participation may continue to fall.
For the broader cryptocurrency industry, this development represents another step toward mainstream adoption. By solving the security-accessibility dilemma that has limited institutional DeFi participation, the integration could help accelerate the convergence of traditional finance and decentralized protocols.
The integration also highlights the growing sophistication of DeFi infrastructure, moving beyond the experimental phase toward enterprise-grade solutions that meet institutional standards for security, reliability, and compliance.
As institutional DeFi participation grows, we can expect to see increased liquidity, more sophisticated financial products, and potentially lower transaction costs across the ecosystem. However, the success of such integrations will depend heavily on maintaining the security standards that institutions require while preserving the innovative potential of decentralized finance.
This article was published on October 1, 2025, and reflects information available as of that date.
