Fordefi

Fordefi is the first institutional-grade MPC (Multi-Party Computation) wallet and security platform purpose-built for decentralized finance. Founded in 2021 and acquired by Paxos in November 2025 for approximately $100 million, Fordefi enables trading firms, hedge funds, market makers, and treasury operations to self-custody digital assets while accessing thousands of DeFi protocols across any blockchain—including Solana—without relying on externally held keys or browser wallets that were never designed for institutional risk management.

The Problem Fordefi Solves

Institutions entering DeFi face a fundamental tension: the most productive on-chain strategies require frequent interaction with smart contracts, liquidity pools, and staking protocols, yet handing that workflow to a third-party custodian introduces both operational friction and counterparty risk. At the same time, using consumer-grade hot wallets exposes treasuries to phishing, malicious contract approvals, and insider threats. Fordefi was built specifically to eliminate this tradeoff.

Core Technology: MPC Key Management

Fordefi's foundation is Multi-Party Computation cryptography, which distributes private key shares across multiple isolated hardware environments rather than assembling a complete key in any single location. This design removes the single point of failure that makes both custodial wallets and traditional hardware wallets vulnerable. Key shares are secured by isolated hardware and biometric authentication; transaction signing requires cooperation among distributed parties, so no single device or employee can unilaterally move funds.

Users retain full ownership of their private keys throughout. Fordefi also offers independent disaster-recovery options or third-party backup management depending on an organization's operational requirements.

Platform Components

The Fordefi platform is composed of four integrated layers:

Browser Extension. A chain-agnostic wallet that connects to dApps across EVM networks, Solana, Cosmos, and other ecosystems through a single interface. Unlike consumer wallets that require separate extensions per chain, Fordefi's extension unifies the transaction experience. It includes transaction simulation—showing users the expected outcome before signing—and real-time risk alerts that flag suspicious contracts or phishing attempts.

Mobile App. iOS and Android applications provide approvers with detailed transaction information including decoded smart-contract function calls, expected asset flows, and policy status, enabling informed approvals from any location.

Web Console. The administrative dashboard for vault creation, user management, policy configuration, and portfolio-wide balance monitoring. Administrators can define multi-tiered approval workflows and set permissions by user, dApp, asset type, or transaction value.

REST API and MPC SDK. For programmatic workflows—automated market-making, algorithmic trading, treasury rebalancing—Fordefi exposes a complete developer toolkit covering wallet creation, transaction lifecycle management, and blockchain data access. The MPC SDK also enables Wallet-as-a-Service deployments, allowing exchanges or fintech platforms to embed self-custodial wallet infrastructure into their own products.

Policy Engine

One of Fordefi's most operationally significant features is its granular policy engine. Organizations can set rules that govern which users can initiate which types of transactions, to which counterparties, at what value thresholds, requiring how many approvers. Policies can be scoped to specific dApps, smart contracts, or asset classes. This brings institutional-grade controls—comparable to what exists in traditional financial systems—into the DeFi context for the first time.

Solana Support

Fordefi added native Solana support in June 2023, making it one of the earliest institutional-grade wallets to offer direct Solana DeFi access. Through the browser extension, institutional users can interact with Solana dApps such as Orca (concentrated liquidity), Raydium (AMM and swaps), and Jito (liquid staking) with the same transaction transparency and policy controls available on EVM chains. The platform handles Solana's account model natively, without requiring a separate wallet extension.

Solana Foundation's Ben Sparango highlighted the need for "infrastructure products like the Fordefi platform that enable institutions to efficiently and intuitively manage their assets." Fordefi also published technical deep-dives on Solana nonce reconciliation for programmatic transaction management, reflecting genuine protocol-level engineering rather than superficial chain support.

Security and Compliance

Fordefi has achieved SOC 2 Type II certification audited by Ernst and Young, covering the security, availability, and confidentiality of its systems. The platform has undergone penetration testing by Skylight Cyber and NCC Group. Clients' assets are covered by insurance from Munich Re. The company also integrates with Chainalysis to provide AML compliance screening within the transaction workflow, addressing regulatory requirements for institutional operators.

Fordefi maintains a 99.9% uptime guarantee and supports independent disaster recovery so clients are never solely dependent on Fordefi infrastructure for key access.

Customers and Adoption

Fordefi's customer base spans multiple institutional segments: hedge funds (Ouroboros Capital, Pantera Capital, DeFiance Capital), digital-asset market makers (Keyrock), and Web3 investment firms operating active DeFi treasury strategies. These use cases typically involve high transaction frequency across multiple protocols and chains, which is precisely the environment where Fordefi's combination of self-custody, policy controls, and multi-chain accessibility adds the most value.

Funding and Acquisition

Fordefi raised $18 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Illuminate Financial, followed by a $10 million round in February 2024 led by Electric Capital, with Paxos and Alchemy participating as new investors. Total funding reached $28 million prior to acquisition.

In November 2025, Paxos—the stablecoin and settlement infrastructure company behind USDP, PYUSD (for PayPal), and USDG—acquired Fordefi for approximately $100 million. Paxos had been a strategic investor since the 2024 round, and the acquisition brought Fordefi's MPC wallet infrastructure into Paxos's broader regulated financial infrastructure stack. The Fordefi platform continues to operate and is actively maintained under Paxos ownership.

Wallet-as-a-Service

Alongside its direct institutional offering, Fordefi launched a Wallet-as-a-Service product that enables exchanges, neobanks, and fintech platforms to embed MPC self-custody directly into their applications. This extends Fordefi's core technology to retail-facing contexts where platforms want to offer non-custodial wallets without building MPC infrastructure in-house. The Paxos acquisition significantly accelerates this distribution channel given Paxos's existing network of regulated financial institution partners.

Summary

Fordefi represents the institutional infrastructure layer that DeFi lacked for its first several years: a platform where organizations can participate in on-chain markets at scale without accepting the security, compliance, and operational risks of custodial arrangements or consumer wallet tooling. Its native Solana support, deep policy engine, and developer API make it relevant across the full spectrum of institutional DeFi activity—from passive staking to active trading strategies. Under Paxos ownership since late 2025, Fordefi's MPC technology is positioned to become a standard component of regulated digital-asset infrastructure globally.