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Konstantin Richter

CEO & Founder, Blockdaemon

Search every verified Konstantin Richter interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Konstantin Richter, CEO and founder of Blockdaemon, participated in a panel discussion titled "Beyond Yield: The Institutional Case for Staking" at the Avalanche Summit NYC on September 29, 2026. During the session, he discussed the current state of institutional staking, stating that the only institutions actively staking are mostly crypto-native investment funds. He noted that the staking landscape remains limited for large-scale institutions due to regulatory uncertainty and vendor quality, adding that more work is needed before major financial institutions would stake assets. Richter also commented on the competitive dynamics of the staking service provider market, describing how some operators succeed by running offshore entities with minimal infrastructure while offering high rewards. He contrasted this with the operational requirements of serving large institutions, which he said include audits, balance sheet credibility, and enterprise-grade services. The panel also touched on how different networks have varying bonding periods and token flows, which affects institutional participation.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“The best way to be a staking service provider if you want to make money is you're an offshore entity with a single server in a basement in a country where you can have a website and say you provide 24/7 customer support and offer very cutting edge rewards. Those are the validator operators that win the most business. You're trying to get as many tokens connected to a single server and a single engineer as possible. A”

“The only institutions actively staking are mostly cryptonative investment funds. The staking landscape in terms of regulation, vendor quality as well as protocol quality is very limited for large scale institutions. There's still a lot of work to be done for JP Morgan to want to stake assets. We don't have long-term clear regulatory ruling in place and yes there's going to be compromises but it's going to slow that d”

“we believed in a future in which crypto ultimately revolutionizes our financial system because we saw a lot of problems in the financial system. So, our long-term strategy of providing rails for institutions to connect to crypto networks has never changed.”

“We're still waiting on regulatory clarity — meaning reserve requirements and oversight for these digital asset services haven't been clearly defined — and when there's any legal gray area institutions will not engage, so even once rules arrive we expect roughly a 12‑month lag before you see real workflow flows.”

“Blockdaemon sells two distinct products: on‑prem wallets that allow institutions to sign digital transactions with multi‑party policies encrypted on‑prem, and nodes for liquidity sequencing and monitoring -- our on‑prem wallet is uniquely positioned to support agentic payments and transaction settlement.”

“Wallets are critical for institutional adoption: they need to be highly secure — air-gapped for TradFi — and the risk around digital wallets has to be essentially zero; additionally, we need insurance products to protect companies from smart-contract risk and hacks.”

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