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:
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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.
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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.
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Transaction management: Automated nonce management, gas optimization, queuing, and retries for reliable, scalable onchain operations—even at high volumes.
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Abstracted onboarding: Embedded wallet creation that’s invisible to users—onboard via email, social login, or OAuth, with no extension install or confusing popups.
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Ecosystem wallets: Single wallet and identity across any app within a platform or game suite, using an ecosystem SDK.
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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:
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Significant initial build time: From smart account architecture to multi-modal onboarding and key security.
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Continuous maintenance: New EIPs, SDK and API changes, bug fixes, and scaling concerns are a moving target.
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Security vigilance: Every component (key storage, signing flows, gas management) is a critical attack surface—guarding against bugs, exploits, and evolving threats is ongoing.
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API, compliance, and UX drift: Standards shift, wallet connectors change, and new regulations or user behaviors demand constant adaptation.
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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:
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Security hotfixes for new attack vectors, supply chain vulnerabilities, or protocol changes.
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User management scaling for session revocation, recovery, or upgrade logic as userbases grow.
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Security alerts require urgent attention—vulnerabilities, library upgrades, dependency audits.
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Wallet connectors, paymasters, and SDKs update frequently**—each change may break flows or require refactoring.
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Chain integration changes for new EVM/L2s and onramps.
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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:
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Session handling issues and CSRF/XSS vulnerabilities
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Key management flaws (weak protection, export logic bugs)
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Flawed session handling, signature logic, or transaction assembly
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Paymaster or bundler logic correctly estimating gas and not getting frontrunned.
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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]
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Seamless onboarding and invisible wallets via pluggable authentication
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Programmable accounts (ERC-4337/7702), with open auditability and upgradability
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Automated transaction management, built-in queueing, monitoring, retries, and analytics
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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:
Activity | Build from Scratch (Hours) | Openfort (Hours) |
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Core wallet/key mgmt | 160–320 | 4–12 |
Adding onboarding flows | 40-80/flow | 0.5-1/flow |
Adding chain/onramp support | 20–30 per chain/onramp | 0.5–1 per integration |
Gas mgmt, paymaster, chains | 120-180 | 2-8 |
Security updates (yearly) | 40–120 | 0 |
Ecosystem/cross-app features | 150–260 | 4–12 |
Total (first year, estimate) | 530–920 | 11–34 |
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
Feature | Openfort | Fireblocks |
---|---|---|
Deployment | Open source, developer toolkit, white-label | Proprietary SaaS, closed platform |
Key Management | Embedded non-custodial signers, key export | Enterprise multi-party computation (MPC), custody |
Account Model | Smart accounts (ERC-4337), EOAs (ERC-7702) | Custodial wallets, programmable MPC, no AA focus |
Gas Sponsorship | Built-in paymasters, ERC20 abstraction, open | Limited, enterprise custom flows |
Integration | Plug-and-play SDKs (React, Unity, EVM) | API, enterprise dashboards |
Customization | Fully customizable, branded wallets, open infra | Enterprise-focused, limited customization |
Pricing Model | Usage-based, scalable, free tier & open source | Enterprise contracts, high minimum spend |
Focus | B2B non-custodial, payments, trading, developer friendly | B2B custody, treasury, institutional use |
When Should You Build Your Own Wallet System?
Build yourself if:
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You have highly specialized compliance or integration needs not served by standards.
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Ultra-custom key logic, session flows, or protocol-level innovations are core to the product.
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Deep legacy system integration demands a tightly customized stack.
Buy/use Openfort if:
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Wallet flows are necessary but not a core differentiator.
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Brand, user experience, and flexibility matter more than inventing protocol primitives.
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You want to focus engineering on products, not perpetual protocol maintenance.
Making the Decision
Ask these questions:
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Is specialized wallet infrastructure a true core differentiator?
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Do you have leading security and protocol talent in-house—forever?
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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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Check the documentation and quickstart for embedded wallet setup or ecosystem wallets.
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Integrate pluggable onboarding flows within hours.
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Explore community resources for brand-wide wallet SDK deployment and future EIP adoption.