Predicate: If Institutions Are Coming Onchain, This Is How

For more than a decade, institutional adoption of blockchain technology has been held back first by skepticism and later by regulatory uncertainty. That is beginning to change. Blockchain infrastructure has matured, stablecoins and tokenized assets have demonstrated clear utility, and frameworks such as the GENIUS Act are generally giving companies a clearer path to build regulated financial products onchain.

These requirements can include sanctions and AML screening, identity and accreditation checks, collateral eligibility rules, and real-time responses to hacks and exploits. Translating them into software is difficult. It requires teams to combine deep compliance knowledge with sophisticated blockchain engineering, integrate data from multiple risk and identity providers, and continually update their systems as regulations, products, and threats evolve.

For most companies, building and maintaining this infrastructure internally is impractical.

This is where Predicate comes in.

Predicate provides an end-to-end control platform for onchain financial products, tokenized assets, and institutional participants. It allows companies to translate legal, compliance, security, and commercial requirements into programmable policies that can be enforced automatically and in real time at either the application or token-contract level.

Put differently, Predicate allows companies to retain the benefits of operating on public blockchains without giving up the controls required to operate in regulated markets. By abstracting this complexity away, Predicate helps customers launch products, onboard users and capital, and expand distribution without building a dedicated compliance and blockchain engineering function themselves.

In practice, an earn product or vault can use Predicate to potentially verify whether a depositor is eligible and whether incoming assets meet its risk requirements before accepting a transaction. A stablecoin issuer can automatically freeze, pause, or restrict sanctioned, illicit, or exploit-linked addresses. Predicate integrates the necessary identity, blockchain-risk, and cybersecurity data, and also offers managed services for enterprise customers, handling the manual reviews, escalations, and reporting that cannot be fully automated.

The result is an end-to-end system for designing, enforcing, and operating digital asset controls at scale as regulations, products, and risk conditions change.

We believe this infrastructure will become increasingly important as more financial activity moves onchain. No stablecoin issuer, asset manager, fintech, or application should need to build bespoke controls from scratch. These capabilities should exist as shared infrastructure that can adapt across products and jurisdictions while operating continuously.

Predicate is already becoming that infrastructure for certain customers across stablecoins, tokenized assets, vaults, and other financial products. It powers real-time controls for MetaMask USD, serves as the default compliance layer for M0 Extensions, supports Plume as it brings institutional financial products onchain, and works with Paxos Labs, another Blockchain Capital portfolio company, across its onchain financial products. Predicate also integrates with risk and security providers, including TRM Labs and Blockaid, allowing their data to be incorporated directly into customer policies.

We were initially drawn to Predicate because its founders, CEO Nikhil Raghuveera and CTO Jesse Sawa, have the rare combination of skills required to build this company.

Before Predicate, Nikhil worked at Cornerstone Research and BCG, then became Head of Strategy and Innovation at the Celo Foundation, where he helped lead partnerships and product launches at the intersection of traditional and decentralized finance. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and regularly engages with lawmakers and regulators on digital asset policy.

Jesse began his career as a software engineer at JPMorgan, but had already been deep in crypto for years, running Ethereum mining farms and even building a CryptoKitties alternative. He later worked on crypto and compliance infrastructure at Ponto and cLabs, giving him firsthand knowledge of both the technical challenges of enforcing controls onchain and the operational requirements of financial institutions.

Nikhil and Jesse met at Celo and founded Predicate around a shared belief that compliance and risk controls should be built directly into onchain financial infrastructure rather than added after the fact. Since then, we have been impressed by the team’s clarity, pace of execution, and ability to earn the trust of companies operating in highly technical and regulated markets.

We are thrilled to lead Predicate’s $8 million Series A.

As regulated financial activity moves onchain, the infrastructure controlling how products and assets can be used will become essential. We believe Predicate has the potential to become the standard control layer for this new financial system.