Kraken Institutional partners with Upshift to bring customers custom institutional vaults
Kraken Institutional has partnered with Upshift to integrate custom institutional vaults, enabling clients to access DeFi yield directly from Kraken’s qualified custody solution without managing separate wallets or onboarding multiple providers.
Kraken Institutional clients can now deploy assets into permissioned vaults directly from their existing custody accounts under a new partnership with Upshift, a multi-chain vault infrastructure provider. The integration eliminates the need for institutions to manage separate wallets or coordinate onchain and centralized activities independently. Assets held in Kraken’s qualified custody can be deployed into custom vaults, with receipt tokens returned to segregated custody accounts, ensuring transparency and institutional controls remain intact throughout the process.
Upshift builds dedicated vaults tailored to each client’s strategy, asset mix, liquidity needs, and risk parameters, rather than offering generic shared pools. Kraken will collaborate with Upshift and vetted vault curators to support DeFi, CeFi, PayFi, and real-world-asset strategies across over 30 chains. Idle stablecoin, ETH, or BTC positions held through Kraken Institutional can serve as the foundation for broader capital deployment strategies, streamlining yield generation without additional operational burdens.
The partnership combines Kraken’s qualified custody, exchange liquidity, prime execution, OTC services, staking, and margin financing with Upshift’s vault infrastructure. This integration aims to provide institutions with a capital-efficient platform to generate yield and access cross-market opportunities through a single relationship, removing the historical trade-off between secure custody and capital deployment.
Eligible Kraken Institutional and Kraken Custody clients in supported jurisdictions can access Institutional Vaults, subject to onboarding and strategy-specific terms. Access requires contacting a Kraken Institutional representative or visiting kraken.com/institutions. Custody services are provided by Payward Financial, Inc. or Payward Europe Solutions, Ltd, with rewards variable and not guaranteed.