Overview
Wirex is a hybrid neobank serving both businesses and consumers. On the B2B side, it offers treasury services for companies to park funds, earn yield, and pay vendors or employees. On the B2C side, it provides consumer wallets, cards, and investing—similar to Revolut or Chime.
By building on blockchain rails, Wirex can operate globally without needing licenses or banking partners in every region, reduce compliance overhead by remaining non-custodial, and enable faster and cheaper payments for their users. It can also tap into existing onchain primitives — making it easier to launch financial products like yield on deposits, trading, and payments; expand its offering faster.
Why Upgrade from EOAs to Smart Wallets
Wirex initially built its platform on externally owned accounts (EOAs), which were sufficient for basic use cases like storing assets and facilitating transfers. But EOAs are fundamentally limited — they rely on a single private key which has vendor lock-in and security limitations, lack programmability, and offer no built-in logic for governance, automation, or compliance.
As Wirex expanded into institutional-grade treasury services, these limitations became bottlenecks. They needed wallets that could act as more than static accounts — wallets that could enforce policies onchain, automate complex workflows, support multiple signers, and deliver a seamless, consumer-grade user experience.
Smart wallets offered that next step: programmable accounts that embed business logic directly into the wallet layer, enabling capabilities like multi-sig governance, automated payouts, transaction policies, gas sponsorship, and passkey-based authentication — all without compromising security or scalability.
Why Crossmint
Once Wirex decided to upgrade from EOAs to smart wallets, they needed a solution that could scale with their ambitions — supporting advanced financial products, simplifying operations across chains, and delivering an experience that felt seamless for users. Their initial approach, which combined an EOA vendor with a separate account abstraction provider, quickly hit its limits: it required multiple SDKs, custom logic for each chain, and lacked the enterprise-grade features needed to power complex treasury workflows and programmable financial services.
Crossmint offered a more sophisticated, unified alternative — a single, future-proof wallet infrastructure purpose-built for enterprise use cases, with advanced functionality and no vendor lock-in. Wirex retains full architectural flexibility, allowing them to alternate custody models, evolve their setup, or migrate vendors without creating new wallets, issuing new addresses, or moving assets. They can simply rotate keys — and users keep the same wallet throughout.
🧩 Unified Wallet Infrastructure
- One SDK across chains: Wirex now manages wallets across EVM, Solana, Stellar, and more with a single integration, eliminating per-chain custom code and dramatically reducing engineering overhead.
- Unified logic: One platform handles key management, smart wallet logic, and account abstraction — no need to stitch together multiple vendors or systems.
🔐 Enterprise-Grade Governance and Security
- Programmable governance: Policies like multi-sig, velocity limits, and role-based access can be enforced directly onchain instead of through non-auditable offchain middleware. This meets the security and compliance standards of modern financial institutions and allows regulators to independently verify non-custodial claims.
- Advanced modules: Features like gas sponsorship, session keys, and custom treasury workflows come out of the box — and when Wirex needs bespoke functionality (like introducing latency into transaction signing for stablecoin card payments), they can build and deploy their own modules without relying on vendor updates.
- Flexible custody and key management: Signers can be emails, passkeys, TEEs, or external wallets, and they can be added, rotated, or removed without migrating funds or disrupting operations. Wirex can also switch between custodial and non-custodial models as needed — all without issuing new wallets or moving assets.
- No vendor lock-in: Modular signers and composable design eliminate vendor lock-in and allow Wirex to adopt new security models or migrate vendors without changing wallet addresses and migrating all assets.
⚙️ Speed and User Experience
- Faster time to market: With no per-chain vendor patchwork, Wirex has reduced integration complexity and accelerated development — delivering in weeks what would have taken months and freeing teams to focus on new features.
- Seamless user experience: Email- or passkey-based wallets remove blockchain friction for users, while native gas sponsorship eliminates the need to manage onchain fees.
A Wirex product lead summarized the impact of the migration this way:
Looking Ahead
Wirex sees Crossmint as a long-term infrastructure partner for its neobank services. By unifying wallet infrastructure under Crossmint, they can:
- Build bank-grade governance and compliance controls for treasury and institutional products.
- Deliver consumer-grade user experiences for retail customers, with simple onboarding and no gas fees.
- Scale into new markets, chains, and product lines without overhauling their wallet architecture.
Wirex’s move reflects a broader trend: financial institutions are increasingly standardizing on smart wallets as the foundation for both consumer and institutional finance. With Crossmint, they gain the flexibility, trust, and scalability needed to power the future of onchain banking.
