This Ethereum Startup Is Building a 'DeFi Firewall' for Institutional Investors

Announced Wednesday, wallet and custodial technology provider Trustology has added a "DeFi Firewall" to its suite of institutional-investment tools.

The "Firewall" is basically a set of rules or filters selected by a fund, specifying which DeFi protocols or decentralized exchanges they consider kosher.

With DeFi's liquidity mining opportunities driving adoption and demand, investors from a more traditional or institutional background want some of this action.

Trustology, which is backed by ConsenSys and Two Sigma Ventures, has already built wallet-native tools to prevent clients from sending their crypto to the wrong address or the wrong exchange, and now this is being extended to DeFi smart contracts, explained Trustology CEO Alex Batlin.

Just last week, the Chicago DeFi Alliance launched a Liquidity Launchpad program to get "Informed and professional players" into the DeFi space.

Certain blockchains have endeavored to protect smart contracts by preventing unauthorized access, and there are several DeFi-primed wallet solutions around today, said Batlin, but nothing that offers the type of institutional controls for businesses to legally operate in DeFi.Next on the Trustology roadmap will be the introduction of "DeFi Notifications," Batlin said.

This is an automated system to deal with DeFi events, such as when a fund manager has placed a lot of collateral in a particular smart contract and the price of ether has gone up or down.

Further down the road, the plan is to introduce "DeFi Flows," Batlin added.

If institutional DeFi is a thing, what form is it likely to take?

"We've signed up five new funds in the last two weeks and they were all guys from the traditional space who had set up crypto funds to focus on DeFi. So it's more about fragmentation than traditional funds allocating."