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Openfort Wallets: Build vs. Buy

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Openfort Wallets: Build vs. Buy

Wallets and key management touch nearly every modern Web3 application, yet wallet infrastructure is rarely a product’s core differentiator. Despite this, teams often spend months building and maintaining the foundations for onboarding, key management, and transaction flows—effort that could be invested in core innovation instead.

Let’s break down the real costs, beyond the surface, of building onchain wallet infrastructure from scratch versus using a service like Openfort Wallets.

How Openfort Works

Before making a decision, it’s key to understand what Openfort provides under the hood. Openfort is an open-source wallet platform with modular building blocks for account abstraction, key management, and transaction orchestration.

Key features include:

  1. Open-source key management: Non-custodial signer with secure key generation, split-key storage using SSS, and export options so users truly own their wallet and can migrate at any time.

  2. Account model: Full support for ERC-4337 smart contract accounts (programmable, modular, upgradable) and emerging smart EOAs via ERC-7702, making it future-proof and composable.

  3. Transaction management: Automated nonce management, gas optimization, queuing, and retries for reliable, scalable onchain operations—even at high volumes.

  4. Abstracted onboarding: Embedded wallet creation that’s invisible to users—onboard via email, social login, or OAuth, with no extension install or confusing popups.

  5. Ecosystem wallets: Single wallet and identity across any app within a platform or game suite, using an ecosystem SDK.

  6. Developer flexibility: Prebuilt UI elements, full headless integration via SDKs, and compatibility with modern frameworks (Wagmi, RainbowKit and Viem).

The Hidden Costs of Building Your Own Wallet Infrastructure

Teams often underestimate what it really takes to build and operate foundational wallet infrastructure in-house. Like authentication, wallets require:

  • Significant initial build time: From smart account architecture to multi-modal onboarding and key security.

  • Continuous maintenance: New EIPs, SDK and API changes, bug fixes, and scaling concerns are a moving target.

  • Security vigilance: Every component (key storage, signing flows, gas management) is a critical attack surface—guarding against bugs, exploits, and evolving threats is ongoing.

  • API, compliance, and UX drift: Standards shift, wallet connectors change, and new regulations or user behaviors demand constant adaptation.

  • Ecosystem fragmentation: Keeping up with the best ways to connect, fund, and manage wallets across EVM chains means continuous refactoring.

Even if starting with open-source modules, most wallet libraries are not complete solutions and often lack enterprise-grade maintenance or support—leaving gaps for teams to fill alone.

Time Investment

Building the functional equivalent of Openfort’s infrastructure from scratch typically requires:

  • 2-4 weeks for a senior developer to implement email/password login, session management, and password reset functionality
  • 1-2 weeks for implementing each additional auth provider (Google, GitHub, etc.)
  • 3–5 weeks for secure embedded key management, and key export.
  • 2–3 weeks to implement ERC-4337 smart account/contract logic, batching, gasless and signature validation.
  • 2–3 weeks for security reviews, code audits, and fixing edge cases.

Total: 10–16+ weeks before production readiness, assuming senior team expertise in cryptography, wallet interface design, and onchain payment flows.

Ongoing Maintenance

Wallet infra is not “build once and forget.” After launch:

  • Security hotfixes for new attack vectors, supply chain vulnerabilities, or protocol changes.

  • User management scaling for session revocation, recovery, or upgrade logic as userbases grow.

  • Security alerts require urgent attention—vulnerabilities, library upgrades, dependency audits.

  • Wallet connectors, paymasters, and SDKs update frequently**—each change may break flows or require refactoring.

  • Chain integration changes for new EVM/L2s and onramps.

  • User expectations continually rise—onramps, magic authentication, and ecosystem-wide portability become essential.

Security Risks

Wallets are security-critical infrastructure; small missteps can be devastating:

  • Session handling issues and CSRF/XSS vulnerabilities

  • Key management flaws (weak protection, export logic bugs)

  • Flawed session handling, signature logic, or transaction assembly

  • Paymaster or bundler logic correctly estimating gas and not getting frontrunned.

  • Vulnerabilities in fallback, recovery, or upgrade flows

Many of these risks may only surface after a breach, and remediating post-hoc can be catastrophic for trust and brand.

The Openfort Approach

Openfort dramatically reduces wallet plumbing and enables teams to ship robust, feature-rich user flows with just a few lines of code:[3][4][1]

  1. Seamless onboarding and invisible wallets via pluggable authentication

  2. Programmable accounts (ERC-4337/7702), with open auditability and upgradability

  3. Automated transaction management, built-in queueing, monitoring, retries, and analytics

  4. Open source, branded, extensible infrastructure that doesn’t lock in your stack or restrict customization.

Time to Market

Using Openfort, implementation is typically:[4][3]

  • 1–2 hours for embedding wallets and onboarding flows
  • 30–60 minutes to add custom branding or connect paymasters/bundlers
  • 1-2 days: Cohesive ecosystem wallet/identity setup
  • Security updates handled by Openfort

This represents a 90–95% reduction in time-to-production compared to building everything in-house.

Cost Comparison

Beyond the direct engineering time, there's the opportunity cost of resources diverted from your core product:

ActivityBuild from Scratch (Hours)Openfort (Hours)
Core wallet/key mgmt160–3204–12
Adding onboarding flows40-80/flow0.5-1/flow
Adding chain/onramp support20–30 per chain/onramp0.5–1 per integration
Gas mgmt, paymaster, chains120-1802-8
Security updates (yearly)40–1200
Ecosystem/cross-app features150–2604–12
Total (first year, estimate)530–92011–34

At an average developer cost of $150/hour, Openfort typically saves $74k–$136k or more in the first year alone—capital that can be directed toward breakthrough features and user growth.

Choosing between Openfort and Fireblocks

FeatureOpenfortFireblocks
DeploymentOpen source, developer toolkit, white-labelProprietary SaaS, closed platform
Key ManagementEmbedded non-custodial signers, key exportEnterprise multi-party computation (MPC), custody
Account ModelSmart accounts (ERC-4337), EOAs (ERC-7702)Custodial wallets, programmable MPC, no AA focus
Gas SponsorshipBuilt-in paymasters, ERC20 abstraction, openLimited, enterprise custom flows
IntegrationPlug-and-play SDKs (React, Unity, EVM)API, enterprise dashboards
CustomizationFully customizable, branded wallets, open infraEnterprise-focused, limited customization
Pricing ModelUsage-based, scalable, free tier & open sourceEnterprise contracts, high minimum spend
FocusB2B non-custodial, payments, trading, developer friendlyB2B custody, treasury, institutional use

When Should You Build Your Own Wallet System?

Build yourself if:

  1. You have highly specialized compliance or integration needs not served by standards.

  2. Ultra-custom key logic, session flows, or protocol-level innovations are core to the product.

  3. Deep legacy system integration demands a tightly customized stack.

Buy/use Openfort if:

  1. Wallet flows are necessary but not a core differentiator.

  2. Brand, user experience, and flexibility matter more than inventing protocol primitives.

  3. You want to focus engineering on products, not perpetual protocol maintenance.

Making the Decision

Ask these questions:

  • Is specialized wallet infrastructure a true core differentiator?

  • Do you have leading security and protocol talent in-house—forever?

  • Would those engineering hours deliver more value on crypto-wallet rails or on your actual product?

For most teams, using Openfort lets you launch faster, with stronger security, for a fraction of the cost—so efforts move from wallet fundamentals to the experiences and economies only your app can deliver.

Getting Started

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