🇺🇸United States

Bank de-risking and frozen accounts disrupting treasury’s ability to pay and receive

1 verified sources

Definition

Crypto and web3-native companies frequently experience bank account denials and arbitrary freezes of funds, making hybrid crypto–fiat operations difficult. This friction prevents timely payment of employees and vendors and hinders customers and partners from interacting smoothly with the project, indirectly contributing to churn and lost business when treasury cannot operate normal payment rails.

Key Findings

  • Financial Impact: Blocked access can trap millions in operational capital per incident; recurring frictions can cost projects 5–15% of potential deal flow and vendor discounts annually.
  • Frequency: Weekly/Monthly (recurring compliance reviews and risk sweeps by banks)
  • Root Cause: Traditional banks’ conservative risk appetites and limited crypto integrations lead to over‑cautious de‑risking behaviors (service denial, account freezes) whenever transaction patterns or counterparties trigger internal alerts, even when activity is legitimate.

Why This Matters

This pain point represents a significant opportunity for B2B solutions targeting Blockchain Services.

Affected Stakeholders

Treasury manager, CFO/Head of finance, Banking relationship manager, Accounts payable/receivable staff, Business development and sales teams

Deep Analysis (Premium)

Financial Impact

$1–10M annual impact depending on studio size: 15–25% creator/developer churn, 5–10% feature delay costs, 2–4% yield loss on trapped liquidity • $1–5M annual impact: 8–12% creator churn, 15–25% marketplace volume decline due to payment friction, fraud losses from untracked refunds • $1.2M–$3.5M annually (developer churn 8–12%, delayed product releases, compliance violations, audit delays)

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Current Workarounds

Auditor extends payment terms 30–60 days; client pays in stablecoins to auditor's wallet; auditor manually converts to fiat via secondary exchange • DeFi treasury wallets (Gnosis Safe) with manual multisig approval; payment stream contracts (Sablier); in-kind token payments to vendors; delayed payroll runs • Delayed treasury strategy implementation; use of external crypto-friendly custodians (offshore); manual crypto-to-fiat conversion timing; avoiding bank integration; keeping crypto/fiat separate manually

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Methodology & Sources

Data collected via OSINT from regulatory filings, industry audits, and verified case studies.

Evidence Sources:

Related Business Risks

Systemic theft and loss from compromised treasury wallets and DeFi exploits

$3.1B in crypto stolen in 2022 across the ecosystem (hundreds of millions per year attributable to project/DAO treasuries using DeFi and custodial services)

Locked and inaccessible treasury funds due to lost or hard-to-access keys

Industry-wide, lost or inaccessible keys are estimated in the tens of billions of dollars; for a typical project, 5–20% of treasury value can be functionally frozen during critical windows.

Forced selling at a loss to meet fiat obligations in volatile markets

For typical token-treasury projects, drawdowns of 50–80% in token price during downturns can translate into millions in realized losses per year when liquidations are forced; industry-wide losses from forced downturn selling are in the billions.

Regulatory and tax exposure from manual, error-prone reporting of crypto treasury activity

Mid-size and large crypto firms can face six‑ to seven‑figure penalties and back‑tax assessments per enforcement action; industry-wide exposure is in the hundreds of millions annually as more regulators scrutinize digital asset flows.

Treasury misallocation due to poor visibility and misjudged counterparty and liquidity risk

Failures of major crypto lenders and exchanges have inflicted multi‑billion‑dollar losses on clients, including corporate treasuries; individual projects often lose 20–100% of custodied funds in such events.

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