Manage Your Institutional Crypto Treasury with Utila

Crypto has moved from a speculative asset class to a recognized one that is here to stay. According to Forbes, the crypto economy is worth over $2 trillion.

Among other use cases, crypto has proven to be a solid store of value and better means of payment. This explains why many organizations and firms are adopting crypto.

Currently, CFOs, COOs —and those in related offices—have difficulty managing their organization’s crypto treasury because there are different applications for similar operations, and their security might even be questioned.

Interestingly, leading organizations such as Fasanara and Psalion use Utila to manage their crypto treasury.

What makes Utila the top choice for organizations and institutions when it comes to crypto treasury management?

This short guide is a must-read if you are an institutional investment firm leader considering which treasury management platform to use for your crypto operations.

Why Utila is a Great Choice to Manage Crypto Treasury

Although Utila was founded in 2022, it has amassed over 50 institutional customers within two years of launch.

The founding team utilized their wealth of experience in blockchain, cybersecurity and software engineering from top companies.

Indeed, its rapid adoption is predicated on the popular startup saying of building what the people want; in this case, institutions. 

Here are some cogent attributes that make Utila stand out and more useful for institutional investment firms:

Secure Non-Custodial Asset Management

The first criterion to consider when assessing a robust crypto treasury management platform is security. Institutions deal with relatively large funds, so the best security mechanism is needed to protect them.

The go-to platform for asset management has always been hot and cold wallets. 

However, hot wallets have been a point of compromise for many individuals whose wallets were breached through social engineering. Earlier in 2024, the wallet of the Axie Infinity founder was hacked, and almost $10 million was drained.

Cold wallets have a narrative of being a better method of asset custody. However, there have been cases where the owners of cold wallets misplaced their hardware and lost their assets.

Shockingly, hackers breached one of Ledger’s dependencies—a Web3 cold wallet company—and hacked about $500k worth of crypto assets before the breach was curtailed. This further shows that the cold wallet is as secure as the cold wallet provider.

While cold and hard wallets often suffice for individuals and groups, DAOs and other institutions have always preferred multi-signature wallets, which are also secure and effective.

However, multi-sig wallets are susceptible to smart contract exploits; this was the case during the legendary Parity hack. Similarly, multi-sig private keys can leak. Once the hackers have the minimum number of private keys to sign a transaction, they can siphon the funds.

In addition, multi-sig wallets often record high gas costs due to how multiple signatures are involved in transactions.

At this juncture, what, then, is the best secure non-custodial asset management mechanism?

The answer is secure Multi-Party Computation, which is the design mechanism that Utila adopted for its customers’ treasury management. It is similar to multi-sig but different.

In an MPC wallet implementation, the private keys are created by the shredding of the master private key into two shares; one with the customer and one with Utila, both of which are never seen together even though they are both used to sign transactions.

It is noteworthy that the customer’s private key share is further split among the vault users —all key splitting processes are based on encrypted and unbreakable unbruteforceable algorithms.

With all these complex cryptographic key share algorithms and implementations across several devices, Utila’s security is tight, and it is safe for institutions to utilize its vault as a crypto treasury.

Consolidated View

Organizations often manage their treasuries using different applications and protocols, which may be difficult to keep up with. But Utila creates a system to have a complete picture of the organizational flow of funds and their current balances.

Here is an example of an Utila dashboard where customers have a clear view of their on-chain assets:

First, you must connect your other individual treasury software—such as Exchanges and wallets—to Utila. With Utila, you do not need to check your firm’s balance individually across various separate wallets and exchanges.

The Console will show the balances across the vault, wallets, and exchanges.

This consolidated view has always proven helpful for proper accounting, auditing, and instant awareness of how assets are spread.

Fast and Easy Payment

You can draw checks for your portfolio companies or pay your liquidity providers right from your Utila console. Utila is a smooth institutional payment platform, a feature it had to adopt to be a one-stop platform for treasury management.

Once you access your Utila Console, select the asset to pay, your funding source, and the address you want to pay to. The platform has a lightning-speed payment processing capability to make your payment land in less than a minute.

Payment Automation

Some payments are constant at every organization. They may be for staff, partners, operational bills, charitable donations, and so on. You can save your precious time by automating your payments via Utila.

This is where the Address Book can be useful; you can whitelist addresses you always send funds to, making it easier. For convenience, you can also pay for such whitelisted addresses once in a batch.

Top-notch API to Power Automation

The Utila console is powerful and robust enough to manage crypto treasury. But some transactions or activities are better automated with smart contracts or programs.

Hence, the release of our API, which institutional developers can use to automate their organization’s activities.

Our API is well-documented, which makes it easy for any developers to pick and use to automate transactions on their first attempt.

Batch Transactions

Sometimes, organizations have to pay a lot of people at once. For instance, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) often airdrop their tokens to community members who meet the defined requirements.

Such payments are tedious to make manually. Hence, batch transactions have proven to be useful. In addition, there will be a high accumulation of gas fees if such transactions were to be made one after the other. However, the cost can be minimized if they are batched up.

Utila supports batch transactions in real time. All you need to do is to:

• Select an asset
• Choose the exchange or wallet to pay from
• Add the wallet addresses of your recipient or upload the addresses in Excel format,
• And send!

Robust Yet Simple Governance Framework

A treasury is an organization’s financial powerhouse. Therefore, a protocol should define the power each vault user has. Utila provides organizations with a battle-tested yet intuitive governance framework.

You can indicate individuals who will be responsible for transferring assets from a wallet in the vault. You can also create a quorum to determine the minimum number of such individuals before an approved transaction can be valid.

Here is an example of how the interface looks:

As seen above, several factors can be used to create the governance framework, which must pass before any financial actions are successful in the treasury. This not only secures your organization’s vault but also respects adequate authority.

Bi-directional Ramping Services

Crypto and fiat are independent, yet each has a unique usefulness. For instance, physical payments for commodities in most parts of the world require liquid cash.

Based on different realities and use cases, the Utila team made it necessary to convert fiat to crypto and vice versa fluidly. Hence, there is a bidirectional ramping service on Utila.

The first one is on-ramp services, which involve exchanging fiat for crypto. Some traditional institutions that engage in crypto treasury management often need to swap their fiat for the crypto asset they want.

On-ramp services make it easy to buy crypto without a third party, as organizations can simply use the fiat in their card or bank account to make the purchase.

Off-ramp services, on the other hand, refer to the process of exchanging crypto for fiat. This is often necessary when organizations need to handle operation costs, which would require using fiat currencies.

Here is the good news: You can carry out your on-ramp and off-ramp operations without leaving your Utila console. So many teams have attested that this feature saves them time.

Easy Workflow Integration

As much as Utila is a robust platform for every treasury management operation, it can be integrated with other software you currently use.

If you have preferred software for invoicing or accounting, you can easily integrate it with your Utila vault. All you need to do is utilize your Utila API to read and write between both applications.

KYC/AML Connectivity

Institutions need to comply with the digital asset regulations in their respective jurisdictions.

Moreover, the law mandates external-facing crypto companies to ensure their customers fulfill the Know-Your-Customer and Anti-Money Laundering procedures.

Undergoing KYC and AML procedures can be time-consuming and legally technical. Therefore, Utila has partnered with Chainalysis to leverage their AML services.

This way, Utila customers can simply connect with their AML profile on Chainalysis and wouldn’t need to undergo any process under Utila. This is perfect for companies that already have their Chainalysis AML profiles.

Multi-chain Implementation

There are different blockchains with different technical uniqueness. As a result, users will always have preferences.

On this note, Utila currently supports 12 blockchain protocols, and enterprise customers can add their wallets to these blockchains. 

The supported blockchains include Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Solana, Base, Bitcoin and so on.

Readily Available Accounting Data

The accounting officers, top officials, or auditors might seldom need to access the financial details of the funds in a vault and how they were spent. They can easily be exported for further perusal.

You can access these details by going under Transactions, click on the Export button, and you will have your data in an excel format.

How Utila Helps Firms like Próspera Handle Crypto Treasury

Utila is an application that many institutions are actively using. Here’s a story to highlight the problems some organizations have faced in terms of managing their treasury and how Utila has been helpful:

Próspera Story

Próspera is a company working on the development of tech cities in Special Economic Zones, some areas in a country where the applicable business laws are different from the ones applicable in other parts of the country; such areas were always created to foster international trade and investment.

The company created St. John’s Bay, which was planned to be a Silicon Valley simulation in Honduras. The area grew in residence and financial strength over the years.

This necessitated Próspera scaling its financial operations. First, the Honduras’ financial system proved to be quite inefficient for their purpose. Hence, crypto seems to be a better option.

The company tried various multi-sig solutions but hit roadblocks such as chain limitation and threatened security. They encountered Utila in their search for a better crypto treasury management platform.

Próspera now manages its treasury better with Utila; they can make batch payments, file taxes, and manage all their assets in a single interface.

Utila: Bringing Simplicity to Crypto Treasury Management

So many institutions face huge problems in managing their treasuries, which is reducing their efficiency and workflow chaos.

Utila, a secure MPC-based treasury management platform, has innovatively solved the problems institutions face when adopting crypto.