Forex brokers once treated crypto as an experiment at the edge of the business, a bolt-on to satisfy a handful of clients, and that casual posture is now unravelling. Stablecoin deposits and withdrawals are now a baseline client expectation; the infrastructure behind them shapes a broker’s costs, controls and competitiveness. Building everything in-house was the old reflex, though brokers are now choosier about which capabilities truly repay the effort.
Shawn Yan has worked on this from the infrastructure side for nearly a decade. An early Bitcoin investor and blockchain developer, he founded Cregis in 2017 after watching enterprises fumble crypto asset storage and security. Today the company supplies MPC wallets, wallet-as-a-service and payment engines to over 4,000 clients across banks, exchanges, payment providers and, increasingly, FX brokers.
FinanceFeeds asked him why build-versus-buy so often misleads institutions, and what running your own infrastructure demands.
1. Shawn, you’ve said that many institutions confuse infrastructure ownership with strategic control. Is “build vs. buy” still a live debate in digital asset infrastructure today, or has the market already moved past it?
Part of it is historical. For a long time, owning the technology stack was associated with capability and control. If you built your own core banking system, trading engine, or payment infrastructure, it signaled that you were serious and had the resources to operate at scale. But I think many institutions still apply that logic to categories that have already matured.
Nobody today believes they need to build their own cloud infrastructure to remain competitive. Most companies don’t build their own payment networks. They focus on the parts of the business that actually differentiate them. Digital asset infrastructure is gradually moving in the same direction.
The mistake many organizations make is assuming that owning infrastructure automatically gives them more control. In reality, ownership and control are not the same thing. What matters is control over assets, governance, compliance, customer relationships and business decisions. Whether the underlying infrastructure was built internally or provided by a specialist is often a secondary question.
2. Cregis has worked closely with FX brokers as they bring digital assets into their operations. From what you’ve seen, why is this shift happening now, and what does that journey typically look like for a broker that’s never managed crypto infrastructure before?
We’re seeing two structural shifts happening at the same time. First, client demand has matured — stablecoin deposits and withdrawals are no longer a niche request. They’re becoming a standard expectation, particularly in markets across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
Second, the infrastructure has matured enough that brokers can actually act on that demand without taking on unacceptable operational risk. That wasn’t always true.
The journey itself tends to follow a pretty consistent pattern. A broker starts by plugging in a third-party payment gateway — it’s fast to integrate, doesn’t require any internal capability, and gets them up and running quickly. That works fine at small volumes. Then the business grows, transaction volumes rise, and the structural problems of that model start showing up. Costs tied to transaction percentage become significant, client withdrawal speed becomes a pain point compared to what crypto-native platforms offer, and the broker starts realizing that a meaningful amount of client funds are sitting with a third-party they don’t fully control.
That’s usually when the conversation about owning their own wallet infrastructure begins.
3. Forex brokers have historically relied on specialist vendors for everything from trading platforms to CRM to payments, rather than building in-house. Why does digital asset infrastructure tend to follow that same pattern, instead of brokers trying to build it themselves the way crypto-native exchanges do?
An FX broker’s core competency has never been technology. It lives in client acquisition, relationships and risk handling, and the firms that thrive invest there instead of rebuilding what already exists. Even the most sophisticated players decline to build wallet infrastructure themselves, leaning on providers such as Fireblocks or, increasingly, Cregis. Once firms of that calibre buy outside infrastructure, it shows where the economics land for everyone below.
4. Many brokers start their crypto journey on a pooled payment gateway model before eventually moving toward owning their own wallet infrastructure. What typically triggers that shift, and what does the transition actually involve operationally?
Gateways perform beautifully early on, but as transaction volumes grow, brokers usually start running into three issues: cost, control and client experience.
Cost bites first, since gateways take a percentage of every transaction, trivial at low volumes but ballooning once monthly stablecoin flow grows. Control follows, as the pooled model makes brokers pre-fund an account the PSP holds and pays from. At scale, that becomes an exposure, since provider trouble halts operations and strands capital. Client experience suffers too, as withdrawals that settle in seconds elsewhere crawl on a gateway bound to the PSP’s timetable.
Making the move proves weightier than most anticipate, because you take on functions you never handled before: address management, approval workflows, reconciliation, risk controls, AML monitoring.
5. Many brokers are now moving from third-party payment gateways to owning more of their wallet infrastructure. What does that migration typically look like in practice?
The interesting thing is that most firms don’t start the migration because they’re chasing new technology. They start because the business has reached a point where the existing model no longer fits.
A typical customer already has payment capabilities in place and is processing meaningful transaction volumes. As the business grows, they begin to question the cost of routing everything through third-party gateways, the visibility they have over fund flows, and whether their approval processes can keep up with the scale of the operation.
The first major change is ownership of the wallet layer. Instead of routing high-value deposits through an external gateway, institutions move those assets directly into infrastructure they control. That gives them greater visibility over liquidity, treasury management, and operational risk.
The second change is governance. As more teams become involved, finance, operations, treasury, and compliance all need different levels of authority. Moving to self-managed infrastructure isn’t just about custody—it’s about introducing structured approval workflows, role-based permissions, and clear audit trails that simply aren’t available in a standard payment gateway.
The firms that navigate this transition most successfully usually share two characteristics. First, they’re aligned internally on what they’re trying to achieve, whether that’s lower costs, greater control, faster settlement, or a combination of those objectives. Second, they understand that this is an operational transformation, not just another software integration.
6. Beyond cost and control, what tangible business uplift have you seen brokers realize once their digital asset infrastructure is fully operational?
The most immediate one is withdrawal speed. When a broker can process client withdrawals directly from their own wallet infrastructure rather than routing through a PSP, the speed improvement is significant — from minutes to near-instant in most cases.
Close behind is operational efficiency, where an approval workflow with automated reconciliation collapses the manual matching that once consumed finance teams, leaving clean, auditable processes.
A third gain, often underrated, is absorbing large inflows head-on. Institutional and high-net-worth clients bring sizeable deposits and handling them cleanly opens doors once closed. A reputational dividend rounds things out, since assets in the broker’s own infrastructure, clear of any pooled arrangement, reassure clients in markets scarred by PSP failures and frozen funds.
7. Looking at where FX brokers’ digital asset needs are heading next, what gaps in the market do you see Cregis needing to fill, and how is that shaping where you’re investing in product development?
Something interesting is underway, as brokers stop treating crypto as a mere payment rail and fold it into how they run treasury, settlement and daily finance. Payments remain the entry point, and once that foundation is solid, requirements branch in two directions.
One direction is richer governance and compliance. As volumes and scrutiny climb, brokers want infrastructure to evidence AML controls, generate clean audit trails and produce the reporting regulators expect, an area we keep investing in as frameworks like MiCA harden and Middle East rules take shape.
The second one is treasury sophistication. Brokers now hold meaningful stablecoin balances as a structural feature. They need finer tools like automated sweeping, multi-entity visibility and settlement routing to move them across chains, accounts and jurisdictions. Across both fronts, FX brokers are treating crypto as a core pillar of how they operate, well past its bolt-on origins, and our roadmap follows.
