Almost every fintech we talk to wants the same thing. They want to offer their users something on-chain — yield on stablecoins, a crypto-backed loan, the ability to hold a tokenised stock — and they want it without becoming a crypto company to do it.
The problem is the part in the middle. To offer even a couple of these products yourself, you have to integrate dozens of protocols, handle gas, manage non-custodial signing, bundle transactions, and monitor risk across venues. That is six to twelve months of specialised engineering for products that are not your core business. If a team with strong engineers finds on-chain integration painful — and most do — it is broken for everyone else.
An on-chain financial API is the layer that removes that middle. One interface for yield, lending, trading, tokenised assets, and the risk data underneath all of it. You call an endpoint, you get back a ready-to-sign transaction, your user signs it. That is the whole shape of it.
What you can actually offer
Through one integration you get six products:
- Earn — crypto yield. Pick the market, pick the product, the blockchain complexity is handled for you. 26,000+ yield venues behind a single API, 3–10% APY on stablecoins, ETH, and BTC.
- Swaps — buying and selling hundreds of crypto assets, cross-chain, with gas sponsored so the end-user pays nothing.
- Portfolio Management — a consolidated view of positions, with rebalancing that bundles many transactions into a single signature.
- Credit — crypto-backed loans, paired with a card for off-ramp, so a user can borrow against their assets without selling them.
- Tokenised Assets — tokenised US equities, ETFs, and commodities on-chain. 438 live equities at real-time prices, the kind of names people actually recognise.
- Perpetual trading — stocks, commodities, and foreign exchange.
You do not have to ship all of them. Most platforms start with one — usually yield or loans — and add the rest as their users ask for them. The point is that the surface is already built, so adding the next product is a configuration change, not another six-month project.
How you integrate
There is one platform, and a few ways into it depending on who is doing the integration.
- API for a backend integration.
- SDK for app-side.
- CLI for scripting, ops, and AI agents.
- Studio, a visual builder, so a platform can configure and ship a product without writing the integration by hand.
Same products underneath, different doors in. A new customer is typically live in about a week from a signed agreement, not the six to twelve months it takes in-house.
The part that trips people up: who holds the money
This is the question every serious integration asks first, so it is worth being precise. The asset never moves through us. We do not execute transactions and we do not hold funds.
What actually happens is that we prepare the on-chain transaction, and your signer authorises it. On a consumer wallet that is the user's wallet. Inside a fintech it is the end-user's wallet. At an institution it is the custodian or treasury signer. The signer changes per audience, the model does not. We hand you a transaction, you sign it, the funds stay where they are. Non-custodial all the way through.
How you make money on it
The commercial model is built in, and it is flexible on purpose. You can charge an embedded fee on any flow — a deposit, a withdrawal, the yield earned, a loan taken. Fixed amount, variable amount, or a percentage. Configurable per product and per customer. There is no cost to the platform until you start monetising, so you can ship a product, see how users behave, and turn monetisation on when it makes sense.
If none of this is your world
The cleanest way to think about it, if you do not live in crypto, is Plaid but for DeFi instead of bank accounts. Plaid gave fintechs one integration to reach thousands of banks. The same idea applies here. One integration to reach on-chain yield, lending, trading, and tokenised markets, without your team needing to learn the plumbing underneath.
That is the whole category. Not a developer platform, not a managed service. One API that turns months of in-house on-chain engineering into about a week, and lets you offer your users the financial products they are already asking for.
If you are building something where this would fit, we would love to hear about it. Book a demo or explore the docs.
Compass does not control DeFi protocols or smart contracts. Using DeFi protocols involves risk, including potential loss of funds. This is not investment advice.