BitGo Bank & Trust, the digital asset custodian that recently made its debut on the Fortune 500 with $16.2 billion in 2025 revenue, is expanding its institutional offerings by integrating three major decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. Through a partnership with Narval, a compliance-focused gateway, BitGo now allows eligible clients to access lending and savings platforms Aave, Spark, and Tesseract directly from their qualified custody wallets.
The move addresses a persistent tension in institutional crypto: the desire for onchain yield and liquidity versus the need to keep assets under regulated custody. By using Narval's gateway, BitGo ensures that all transactions remain within its compliance framework, with the same wallet sign-offs and custody protections that apply to traditional asset movements. The gateway translates DeFi transactions into human-readable formats and screens them against a whitelist of approved protocols and contract addresses before they reach the signing queue, reducing the risk of blind signing.
Stablecoins are emerging as a key battleground, and BitGo's integration with Spark is particularly notable. Spark Savings now supports USDC and USDT holders on BitGo, and Spark's USDS stablecoin ranks among the largest. Spark CEO Sam MacPherson told Forbes, "Every major bank is going to launch a stablecoin," signaling the competitive landscape. BitGo CEO Mike Belshe emphasized that institutions "want access to DeFi" but need security and governance that meet their standards. Narval CEO Greg Jessner added that the goal is to let institutions participate onchain without sacrificing compliance.
The three protocols offer distinct opportunities: Aave provides decentralized lending and borrowing pools; Spark supports savings and lending tied to stablecoin and ether credit markets; and Tesseract offers client vaults under its MiCA approval in Europe. Aave founder Stani Kulechov called this a "stronger foundation" for institutional DeFi, while Spark's MacPherson flagged liquidity and risk controls as the biggest hurdles.
This launch follows BitGo's June 2 partnership with Concrete, which focuses on onchain asset-growth strategies while keeping assets in qualified custody. Clients can select Concrete vault strategies within BitGo, deploy synthetic asset versions, and track performance via a dashboard. However, both initiatives come with significant caveats. Concrete warns that vault strategies carry DeFi protocol risk, smart-contract risk, liquidity caps, lockups, and potential loss of principal. BitGo's custody protections apply only to assets held in its own wallets, not to synthetic tokens or assets moved into vaults or protocols.
Competition is intensifying. Coinbase recently secured conditional approval from U.S. banking regulators for a national trust company charter, and Anchorage Digital continues to target institutional clients as a federally chartered crypto bank. These moves squeeze BitGo, which is pitching its custody-plus-DeFi approach as a differentiated layer of control. Meanwhile, the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has proposed rules to implement the GENIUS Act, governing payment stablecoin issuance and custody for national banks and certain issuers.
BitGo's Fortune 500 ranking—No. 273—underscores its scale, with over 5,500 clients across more than 100 countries. But adoption remains uncertain. Institutions may be intrigued by the custody setup, but DeFi returns are tied to liquidity, market volatility, software safety, and whether compliance teams will approve a system that, while cleaner than traditional DeFi, still carries inherent risks.
