Picture a founder of a billion-dollar crypto company, hunched over a hardware wallet, triple-checking every character of a $100,000 transaction. One wrong click could be catastrophic. This isn't a rare scene—it's the daily reality for most crypto companies.

While traditional businesses enjoy automated payments, role-based permissions, and seamless financial operations through modern fintech, crypto companies face an impossible choice: trust their treasury to clunky enterprise platforms that cost a fortune, or risk everything with consumer-grade hardware wallets.

The irony cuts deep. These companies chose to build on blockchain because it promised better financial infrastructure. Instead, what should be their competitive advantage—operating onchain—has become their biggest operational burden.

The fundamental challenge of how businesses operate onchain isn't just another problem to solve. It's the problem that unlocks everything else.

And we found out why no one had solved it yet.

The Hidden Cost of Crypto Operations

To understand why this problem persists, we spoke with dozens of crypto companies—from emerging startups to industry leaders—about their daily operations.

The picture that emerged was clear: what looks like a technology problem on the surface is actually a deep operational crisis.

The CFO’s Burden

Finance leaders in crypto companies face challenges that would be unthinkable in traditional finance. Our research revealed three critical problems that compound each other:

1. The manual operations trap

Most CFOs manage millions in transactions through hardware wallets—tools designed for individual users, not company operations.

Senior executives must personally handle every transaction. They sit at their computers, checking and double-checking addresses. Every payroll run. Every vendor payment. Every treasury transfer. The work piles up.

2. Limited financial controls

Traditional businesses take certain things for granted. Want to schedule a payment? Click a button. Need someone's approval? Set up a workflow. Want to limit what junior employees can do? Add some controls.

None of this exists in crypto.

These aren't advanced features—they're fundamental components of running modern businesses. Companies cope by creating manual processes for everything, but each manual process adds more work, more complexity, and more chances for things to go wrong.

3. Flying blind with compliance

Crypto accounting tools have improved, but they can only tell you what already happened. They can’t help you prevent mistakes.

And in crypto, mistakes are expensive. Once a transaction goes through, it's final. There's no bank to call, no charge to dispute, no way to claw back funds sent to the wrong address.

Accountants have to piece together information like detectives. Each transaction is a mystery to solve: Who sent this? What was it for? Which project does it belong to? They hunt for missing records and wait for engineers who never answer emails.

This reactive approach creates a cascade of problems. Teams can't catch issues until it's too late. They can't track spending in real-time. They can't stop unauthorized transactions before they happen. Everything is backwards-looking.

Add traditional banking to the mix, and the complexity multiplies. Now accountants must reconcile two parallel systems: traditional banking for control and compliance, crypto for stakeholder demands. Double the work. Double the complexity. Double the chance for things to go wrong.

The cost isn't just financial. CFOs spend more time preventing disasters than building for the future. It's no way to run a modern business.

The Founder's Perspective

While CFOs wrestle with systems and controls, founders face a different battle entirely. Our conversations with startup founders revealed a painful truth: the very tools that should help them build are holding them back.

1. The growth tax

Every founder knows financial health matters. But in crypto, basic financial operations steal countless hours from actual company building.

Instead of talking to customers, they're processing payroll. Instead of improving products, they're managing vendor payments. Instead of closing deals, they're tracking down transactions. Instead of leading their team, they're reconciling accounts.

These hours should go toward growth. Instead, they vanish into administrative tasks.

2. Different value equation

In traditional businesses, a penny saved is a penny earned. Not in startups.

In startups, growth drives everything. A penny earned is worth more than a penny saved.

Winning customers matters more than optimizing expenses. Raising capital depends on growth metrics, not operational efficiency. Time spent on financial operations carries a massive opportunity cost—every hour lost to administrative tasks is an hour not spent on scaling the business.

The cost isn't just time. It's opportunity.

3. The Emergency Spiral

With growth taking priority, a dangerous pattern emerges. Founders only deal with finances during emergencies.

Payments get delayed, receivables pile up, and financial reports fall behind. Each postponed task adds to a growing burden of "financial debt" that becomes harder to resolve as the company scales.

Like technical debt, financial debt compounds. Today's missed payment becomes next week's urgent wire transfer. This month's missing records become a tax season emergency. Small problems grow into company-stopping priorities.

The cycle continues until something breaks.

The state of onchain financial tools

To understand why crypto companies struggle with financial operations, we need to look at their options carefully. Each available choice reveals part of the problem. Together, they tell the full story.

Hardware wallets

Let's start with hardware wallets, the default choice for many companies.

Tools like Ledger and Trezor offer undeniable security. They protect private keys with dedicated hardware. Physical confirmation for each transaction, making it nearly impossible to steal funds remotely.

But they were designed for holding funds, not handling many transactions. A tool that works perfectly for protecting personal wealth becomes dangerous in a business. One wrong transaction could drain the entire wallet.

Safe smart contract wallets

Smart contract wallets like Safe attempt to solve these problems by enabling shared control and transparency.

These features work well for DAOs, where public operations are a feature, not a bug.

But businesses operate differently. Every signer's address is public, visible to anyone. Permissions are rigid and inflexible. Each blockchain needs its own wallet setup. Even experienced teams struggle with the complexity.

What works for transparent treasury management breaks down under daily business operations.

Enterprise platforms

Enterprise platforms like Fireblocks and Copper promise comprehensive solutions. Multiple chains, detailed permissions, complete control – in theory, they solve every problem we've discussed.

Reality tells a different story.

Pricing increases with transaction volume, penalizing growth. Features target trading desks, not operations teams. KYB requirements and restrictions limit what businesses can do onchain.

A solution that promises everything delivers mainly complexity.

The missing middle

This leaves most crypto companies stranded in the middle.

Too big for consumer tools, too small for enterprise platforms, too private for smart contract wallets.

The only option is to stitch together multiple systems. Hardware wallets guard critical transactions. Smart contract wallets hold treasury. Centralized exchanges handle conversions. Traditional banking fills the gaps.

The result? Exactly what businesses try hardest to avoid: a fragmented system held together by manual processes and constant attention. Security risks multiply. Costs spiral. Tools meant to enable crypto operations become barriers to running crypto businesses.

This can’t be the future of finance.

The future of crypto is yesterday’s news

The solution to onchain operations isn’t incrementally improving these tools. It's rethinking the entire system.

We've spent years building infrastructure for the largest wallets in crypto and seen what works and what doesn't. Most importantly, we've learned that solving this problem requires challenging basic assumptions about how crypto operations should work.

True non-custodial control

The first assumption we challenged was that better user experience requires giving up control. It doesn't.

Recent improvements in smart contract technology, particularly ERC-4337, have changed the game. A wallet can now be both easy to use and fully non-custodial. You no longer have to choose between convenience and control.

You can interact with any token or dApp without asking permission. No whitelists. No restrictions. Just the pure utility of blockchain, the way it was meant to work.

Stackup never touches your assets; all spend controls are applied onchain. You can grant specific access to team members, and let them interact with the entire blockchain, without risking your entire wallet.

Security made simple

The second assumption we challenged was that security requires complexity. It doesn't.

Instead of making you choose between security and usability, we reimagined both. We replaced private keys with passkeys. We eliminated the need for hardware devices, MPC networks, and browser extensions.

The result? Enterprise-grade security that just works. Your team can authorize transactions from any device. Your funds remain under your complete control. Security becomes invisible.

Controls that scale

The third assumption was that crypto operations can't match traditional finance's control systems. They can.

We built role-based access control directly into our smart contracts. Set permissions once, they work across all chains. Create approval workflows that match how your business actually operates. Now you can:

• Create approval flows for different transaction types
• Pay bills without manual intervention
• Schedule payments to happen automatically
• Track every receivable in real time
• Control who can access which assets

Seamless operations

The final piece is eliminating the small frictions that add up to major obstacles.

We handle gas fees across all chains. You can transact without holding native tokens. You can approve invoices by email. Every feature works together seamlessly.

The result is a system that brings traditional financial controls to crypto operations without sacrificing what makes blockchain powerful. No more choosing between control and convenience. No more manual overhead. No more compromises.

This is how crypto operations should have worked from the start.

Bring order to your financial operations

If you’d like to improve the way your business operations onchain, we want to talk with you.

Schedule a call with us.

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