Fireblocks, a crypto infrastructure company that provides custody, transfer, and settlement technology, processed over $4 trillion in cumulative digital asset transactions by late 2024. The company does not trade crypto, issue tokens, or run a blockchain. It builds the plumbing that other companies use. That distinction, between crypto applications and crypto infrastructure, matters because infrastructure spending now drives the majority of blockchain market growth. The global blockchain market reached $31.18 billion in 2025, per Fortune Business Insights, and the Blockchain-as-a-Service segment alone accounts for 51.72% of that revenue.
The Infrastructure Stack
Crypto infrastructure is the collection of services that sit between a blockchain network and the financial products built on it. Just as web applications depend on cloud hosting, CDNs, databases, and authentication services, blockchain-based financial products depend on nodes, oracles, custody solutions, wallets, indexers, and APIs.
The stack has five primary layers. Node infrastructure provides access to blockchain networks. Custody infrastructure secures digital assets. Oracle infrastructure feeds external data (prices, events, identity verification) to smart contracts. Wallet infrastructure manages user keys and transaction signing. Indexing infrastructure makes blockchain data queryable and usable by applications.
Each layer has been commercialised by companies that sell picks and shovels rather than mining for gold. The total infrastructure market is growing faster than the application market because every new DeFi protocol, tokenisation platform, or institutional blockchain deployment requires the same underlying services.
Node Infrastructure and Blockchain Access
Every interaction with a blockchain, whether it is sending a payment, querying a balance, or executing a smart contract, requires a connection to a blockchain node. Running a node requires technical expertise, hardware investment, and ongoing maintenance. Most companies outsource this to node-as-a-service providers.
Alchemy is the largest provider, serving over 100 million users through its API infrastructure. The company provides blockchain access for developers building on Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Arbitrum, and dozens of other networks. Alchemy’s clients include OpenSea, Adobe, and institutional financial platforms that need reliable blockchain connectivity without managing their own node infrastructure.
Infura, owned by ConsenSys, provides similar services and processes billions of API requests daily. The company’s free tier makes blockchain access available to individual developers, while its enterprise plans support high-throughput institutional applications.
QuickNode, which raised $60 million in 2023, offers multi-chain node infrastructure with sub-second response times. The company has expanded beyond basic node access to include data streaming, transaction simulation, and custom RPC endpoints for institutional clients.
These providers are the foundation of the blockchain stack. Without reliable node access, no blockchain-based financial platform can operate.
Custody Infrastructure
Digital asset custody is the most important infrastructure layer for institutional adoption. A hedge fund, pension fund, or asset manager cannot hold blockchain-based assets without a custodian that meets regulatory standards for asset protection, insurance, and operational controls.
Fireblocks provides custody and transfer infrastructure to over 1,800 institutions, including banks, exchanges, and fintech companies. Its multi-party computation (MPC) technology distributes cryptographic key material across multiple parties and devices, so no single compromised system can authorise a transaction. Fireblocks reports that no client has ever lost funds due to a security breach on its platform.
Coinbase Custody, regulated as a qualified custodian under New York banking law, holds assets for institutional investors including BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenised fund. BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custodian bank with over $46 trillion in assets under custody, launched its digital asset custody platform in 2022, providing blockchain-based asset safekeeping within the same institutional framework as traditional securities.
Fidelity Digital Assets, State Street’s Digital division, and BitGo (acquired by Go2 Group) round out the institutional custody market. The common thread is that each provider adapts blockchain-native security (multi-sig, MPC, hardware security modules) to meet the compliance and insurance requirements of traditional financial institutions.
83% of financial institutions exploring blockchain, per Coinlaw, need custody infrastructure before they can deploy. The custody layer is a prerequisite for every other institutional blockchain application.
Oracle Infrastructure
Smart contracts execute automatically based on predefined conditions, but they cannot access data outside their own blockchain. An oracle is a service that feeds external data (asset prices, weather data, sports scores, interest rates) to smart contracts.
Chainlink is the dominant oracle provider, securing over $20 billion in value across DeFi protocols. Its decentralised oracle network aggregates data from multiple independent sources, reducing the risk that a single faulty data feed triggers incorrect smart contract execution. Chainlink’s price feeds are used by Aave, Compound, Synthetix, and dozens of other protocols for real-time asset pricing.
Pyth Network, built on Solana, focuses on low-latency financial data. It receives price feeds directly from trading firms and exchanges (including Jump Trading, Jane Street, and Virtu Financial), delivering sub-second price updates. Pyth is particularly suited for DeFi applications that require the same data speed as traditional high-frequency trading.
For institutional financial applications, oracle infrastructure is important because it determines the accuracy and reliability of automated processes. A tokenised bond that pays coupons automatically through a smart contract needs a reliable interest rate feed. A parametric insurance contract that pays out based on weather data needs a verified weather oracle. Without trusted oracles, smart contract automation is limited to on-chain data only.
Wallet and Key Management Infrastructure
Wallet infrastructure determines how users and institutions interact with blockchain networks. Early crypto wallets required users to manage 12-word seed phrases and raw private keys, a usability barrier that excluded most non-technical users.
Account abstraction, introduced through Ethereum’s ERC-4337 standard in 2023, allows wallets to operate like smart contracts. This enables features that traditional wallets cannot support: social recovery (regaining access through trusted contacts rather than a seed phrase), session keys (temporary permissions for specific applications), and gas sponsorship (applications paying network fees on behalf of users).
Privy and Dynamic provide wallet-as-a-service products that let fintech companies embed blockchain wallet functionality into their applications. A user can create a blockchain wallet using their email address or social login, without ever seeing a seed phrase or understanding that they are using a blockchain. These services handle key generation, storage, and transaction signing in the background.
For institutional users, Fireblocks and Fordefi provide policy-based key management that integrates with existing governance frameworks. A bank’s blockchain wallet can require multiple approvals from designated officers before executing a transfer, mirroring the controls that exist in traditional payment authorisation systems.
Where Infrastructure Investment Is Heading
North America holds 43.80% of the global blockchain market, per Fortune Business Insights. The region’s dominance in crypto infrastructure is even more concentrated. Alchemy, Fireblocks, Coinbase, Chainalysis, and Circle are all headquartered in the United States. The infrastructure layer benefits from network effects: the more applications built on a provider’s infrastructure, the more reliable and cost-effective that infrastructure becomes.
The BaaS segment’s 51.72% market share reflects the reality that most companies adopting blockchain are buyers, not builders, of infrastructure. A fintech company launching a tokenised securities product subscribes to Alchemy for node access, Fireblocks for custody, Chainlink for price feeds, and Securitize for compliance, just as a web startup subscribes to AWS, Stripe, Twilio, and Auth0.
Blockchain-based cross-border payments handle $3 trillion annually, growing at 45% per year, per Coinlaw. Every dollar of that volume flows through infrastructure providers that process, route, secure, and settle the transactions. The companies building this infrastructure are less visible than the applications running on it, but they capture a larger and more durable share of the value being created.
