What Is Blockdaemon? Institutional Staking, Nodes and Wallet Infrastructure

Blockdaemon Inc. was established in October 2017 in San Francisco, with Richter as founder ¹. It opened an office in Galway, Ireland, in 2018, followed by London and Singapore in 2023 and New York and Newcastle in 2024, and registered in Abu Dhabi Global Market in May 2024 ¹.

The company grew partly by acquisition. It bought Lunie (staking interface, February 2021), Anyblock Analytics (blockchain data, November 2021), Gem (March 2022), Sepior (MPC cryptography, July 2022) and expand.network (May 2025) ¹. Sepior's technology underpins the MPC key management that Blockdaemon now sells.

Blockdaemon's products fall into four groups ¹:

• Staking and validators. Blockdaemon operates validators on proof-of-stake networks and lets institutions delegate to them or launch dedicated validators. Its staking page names Ethereum, Solana and Polkadot among eligible networks ².
• Nodes and data. Dedicated nodes, native RPC endpoints, historical data APIs and event streaming for teams that need blockchain access without running their own servers.
• Wallets and key management. "Keys & Policies," an MPC system that splits signing keys into shares so no single device holds a complete key, plus wallet and vault products launched in 2023.
• Yield and tokenization. Services for stablecoin management and tokenization, and access to DeFi yield through an Aave vault and Morpho vaults curated by Gauntlet ².

Companies use these to add staking to an exchange or custody product, to run infrastructure for a blockchain they support, or to build wallets.

Institutional clients go through know-your-business (KYB) checks, then set up a staking configuration that covers the network, whether MEV (maximal extractable value) rewards are enabled, the region where validators run and the address that receives fees ³.

From there, staking runs through Blockdaemon's app or its Staking API. For Ethereum, the API reserves validators and returns an unsigned deposit transaction, which the client signs with its own keys or custodian ³. For Solana, the response includes the staking and withdrawal authorities on the stake account ³. In this model the client, not Blockdaemon, controls the funds and the withdrawal address, while Blockdaemon runs the validator software. The API supports Avalanche, BNB Chain, Cardano, Cosmos, Ethereum, NEAR, Polygon, Solana and TON ³.

Rewards, unbonding periods and exits follow each network's rules. Blockdaemon says it discloses unbonding periods and withdrawal timelines before a client commits ². It offers reward reports, historical rates and exports formatted for accounting and tax ².

Slashing is a protocol penalty that destroys part of a validator's stake for faults such as signing two conflicting blocks. Blockdaemon says it covers 100% of losses from slashing caused by its own fault ⁴. Losses from network malfunctions are excluded ⁴. In March 2022 the company announced a slashing insurance policy arranged through the broker Marsh, triggered by a system or security failure at Blockdaemon that leads to slashing or double-signing ⁵. Public pages do not state a coverage limit or name the insurer.

Coverage does not protect against falling token prices, smart-contract losses in DeFi vaults, or penalties outside Blockdaemon's control.

Blockdaemon does not publish staking commissions or node prices on the pages reviewed ²³⁴. Pricing is set per client contract. Network rewards are variable and depend on the protocol, not on Blockdaemon.

Blockdaemon is privately held. It raised a $28 million Series A in June 2021, a $155 million Series B in September 2021 and a $207 million Series C in January 2022 ¹. The Series C was led by Sapphire and Tiger Global at a $3.25 billion post-money valuation, with SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Boldstart Ventures, StepStone Group, Matrix Capital Management and Lerer Hippeau also participating ⁶.

There is no Blockdaemon stock on public exchanges as of 23 October 2026. Any offer of "pre-IPO" shares through unofficial channels deserves caution; private-company shares trade, if at all, through restricted secondary platforms open to accredited investors.

Blockdaemon reports ISO 27001 certification since July 2022 and a SOC 2 Type II report since June 2025 ¹. These are audits of information-security management and controls. They do not guarantee against outages or losses.

The company publishes a public status page with an incident and maintenance history ⁷, which clients can use to check network-specific outages.

The company's own figures for its scale differ: its About page cites "$110B+" in assets secured and 400+ institutions ¹, while its staking page cites "$6B+" ². The figures are company claims that likely measure different things, and neither was independently verified.

Blockdaemon serves businesses: exchanges, custodians, banks, asset managers and protocol foundations ¹⁵. Individuals who want to stake usually do so through an exchange, a wallet or a liquid staking protocol such as Lido, some of which may use infrastructure providers like Blockdaemon behind the scenes. Other providers of institutional nodes and staking include Figment, Kiln and, for Solana RPC, Helius.