Letting banks bring their own vault

Xalts, backed by Accel and Citi Ventures, helps banks tokenise real assets like bonds, bank guarantees and treasury bills. Those assets live on blockchains like Polygon and Avalanche, inside wallets.

Whoever holds the keys to those wallets is the custodian. That one word is what this project is about.

Without an outside custodian, Xalts held every key. Banks weren't comfortable with that, and Xalts didn't want the risk either.

Being a custodian comes with heavy security and compliance duties. Institutions wanted a provider they already trusted, like Fireblocks, to carry them.

Each organisation has one root user, its admin, and in practice that's someone from IT. I gathered user stories from our founders and PMs, who talked to these clients directly.

Custody is unforgiving, so I worked through the technical requirements with the Fireblocks team directly, and checked feasibility with our developers as I went.

New users meet it inside onboarding, which was already long, so custody became its own small step, broken into four parts. Existing users get a nudge on the home screen that opens the same flow.

Before designing any screen, I mapped every wallet type and who controls it. It's the part that confuses everyone, including us at first.

Then the information architecture: where networks, wallets and users live, so an admin can start from whatever they already know.

Rough sketches and low-fidelity wireframes went to the team early, so feedback landed before any pixels were polished.

It had to feel like the rest of onboarding, so it reused the same patterns and a step tracker on the right. The first screen explains what bringing your own custodian means, then lets you pick one.

When you've just handed over your keys, "did that work?" shouldn't be a guess. A clear success screen closes the loop and makes the whole system feel more reliable.

The organisation console already existed. My job was to make custody and wallet ownership obvious: who is admin, who is owner, who co-signs.

People don't all start from the same place, so wallets appear wherever you'd look for them: on each network, and on each user.

Teach inside the console. Tooltips, a short guided tour and a little education for first-time admins, beyond the info icons.

Test with real bank admins. We designed from stories told by founders and PMs. Watching a few Rajeshes do this live would have caught edge cases we guessed at.

Design for the next custodian now. Blockdaemon and Taurus were already in the research. A flow built for any provider would save a redesign.

A project this technical looked daunting at first. Breaking it into small, clear steps made it manageable, and so did asking for help early and giving it back.