Why the institutional digital asset experience is still broken
Custody…no longer the problem.
For the last decade, access to secure, compliant custody of digital assets for institutions was hardly a certainty. But over time strong qualified custodial offerings from the likes of BitGo, Coinbase Prime, and Anchorage have emerged to address the needs of the market. Combined with a regulatory framework that has evolved from "pending" to "established", the capital is now ready to move.
But operating at scale? That is still a challenge.
AJ and I spent five years building HeightZero — later acquired by BitGo — and we saw the same pattern everywhere: the infrastructure matured, but the operating layer didn't. We have excellent building blocks, but no governed way to run them together.
The result is a fragile patchwork of workflows barely held together:
Visibility is a manual chore
Most serious shops don't hold assets in one place—and they shouldn't have to. EY's 2026 institutional survey puts 61% of institutions on a multi-custodian model, versus 36% on a single provider.1 But when you’re storing assets at different venues, you don't have a balance sheet; you have a collection of fragmented datasets. Every custodian has its own dashboard, its own export, its own definition of a "balance." Producing a single, current view of what you hold and where you hold it turns into a manual reconciliation exercise — spreadsheets stitched together after the fact, based on what quickly becomes stale data. You can't govern what you can't see.
Treasury is a manual process
Moving capital between venues or funding a trade may require hopping through multiple logins, manually whitelisting addresses, and checking a policy document that lives in a separate tab. Every handoff is a place to fat-finger an address or delay a settlement. The controls you take for granted in TradFi — approval thresholds, automated routing — don't exist here yet as standard features. They depend on “manual discipline”. That works, until it doesn't.
Governance is "after the fact"
When your policy lives in a Slack thread and approvals happen in an inbox, you don’t have governance — you have a story you tell auditors after something goes wrong. For a regulated allocator, that isn't an inconvenience; it's an exam finding waiting to happen. If the control isn't built into the execution, it’s just a suggestion — this is not governance.
Up till now this has all been accepted simply as the cost of doing business. But it shouldn't be.
That’s why we built ViaBridge. We don't replace your infrastructure — we orchestrate it. We sit on top of existing custody rails to give you one governed layer: a consolidated view, automated policy enforcement, and a real audit trail that works for regulators.
We don't replace your infrastructure — we orchestrate it.
The industry needed the underlying infrastructure to mature before this layer could be built properly. Now that it has, the firms that win won't be the ones chasing the next custodian. They’ll be the ones that stop managing "operational debt" and start actually operating.
The frontier in institutional digital assets in 2026 isn't better building blocks. It's the governed layer that connects them — the difference between having infrastructure and operating on it.
If you’re still stitching your stack together with spreadsheets and Slack, I’d love to show you how we’re doing it differently.