Introduction
Utila is an institutional digital asset operations platform enabling payment firms and financial institutions to securely manage digital assets across multiple blockchains. Founded in 2022 by CEO Bentzi Rabi and CTO Sam Eiderman, the platform features enterprise-grade MPC wallets with military-grade security, robust APIs for custom applications, comprehensive user and transaction management with policy-based approval flows, and integrations with AML providers, banking rails, exchanges, and DeFi protocols. Designed for payment service providers, stablecoin issuers, neobanks, and institutional investors, Utila processes over $15 billion in monthly volume and has raised $50 million from Nyca Partners, Wing VC, and NFX.
To offer both onchain staking and USDC stablecoin yield directly from its interface, Utila integrated Yield.xyz as its unified earn layer, including an institutional stablecoin yield vault on Optimism.
Challenges
- Institutions needed compliant, auditable access to staking and DeFi yield—not fragmented DeFi UIs and manual wallet workflows.
- Running validators and integrating multiple yield protocols in‑house would add heavy operational and engineering overhead.
- Any solution had to plug cleanly into Utila’s MPC security model, policy engine, and reporting stack.
Yield.xyz Solution
- Unified earn infrastructure: One API for multi‑network staking and curated DeFi yield opportunities (including Gauntlet curated USDC Morpho vault on Optimism).
- Embedded flows: Yield.xyz returns ready‑to‑sign deposit and withdrawal transactions that flow through Utila’s existing policies, approvals, and simulations.
- Institutional reporting: Automated reward handling and position tracking feed into Utila’s audit trails and monitoring, keeping everything visible to operations and risk teams.
Results & Impact
- Clients can stake major assets and earn USDC stablecoin yield from the same Utila workspace they use for custody, treasury, and payments.
- Teams gain onchain yield without sacrificing controls—policies, simulations, and full audit logs remain in place on every yield transaction.
- Utila can roll out new networks and strategies through the same Yield.xyz integration, instead of building protocol‑specific connections each time.
“We’re excited to partner with Yield.xyz to bring comprehensive onchain staking capabilities to our institutional clients. This integration enables our clients to access the full spectrum of yield opportunities across multiple blockchain networks while maintaining the security, compliance, and operational efficiency they require. Yield.xyz’s proven infrastructure and extensive validator network perfectly complement our mission to simplify digital asset operations.” — Bentzi Rabi, Co-Founder & CEO of Utila
Utila made history in November 2025 as the first institutional platform to deliver enterprise-grade stablecoin yield on Optimism Mainnet. Powered by Yield.xyz’s infrastructure — alongside the Optimism Foundation, Morpho, and Gauntlet — the integration enabled 200+ institutional clients to access USDC yields with transaction-level security checks. It solved the long-standing trade-off between earning returns and maintaining strict compliance, establishing an entirely new category of institutional-ready DeFi yield infrastructure.
