Finoa

Finoa Consensus Services offers its institutional clients a choice between three different staking arrangements. In delegated staking the client keeps its tokens in its own wallet or with its custodian and assigns them to a validator that the Berlin team runs. With white-label validators a bank, neobroker or fintech offers staking to its customers under its own name, while the servers stay with Finoa Consensus Services. Node as a service gives a client dedicated nodes on that infrastructure, with liquid staking, distributed validator technology and maximal extractable value where a network supports them.

Asset managers use the service to add staking rewards to digital asset portfolios without building validator operations in-house. Family offices get segregated validators and, on request, private validators that give them full control over performance data. Companies that hold crypto assets in their treasury stake those holdings while Finoa Consensus Services takes care of monitoring and software upgrades.

Finoa started as a custodian for digital assets and received three licenses from BaFin in 2023, for crypto custody, crypto brokerage and proprietary trading. In December 2023 the company raised 15 million dollars in a round led by Maven 11 Capital and Balderton Capital. Today Finoa GmbH describes itself as a technology infrastructure provider that is not an authorized crypto-asset service provider under MiCAR.

Finoa states that it holds neither client assets nor the keys to them, and that a licensed entity has to run any regulated service built on its technology. An institution that needs a licensed custodian in Germany therefore picks one of the banks and custodians with a BaFin license for crypto custody. Staking through Finoa Consensus Services works with assets held at such a custodian or in a wallet that the client controls itself.

Ethereum, the Canton Network and Monad head the list of supported networks, followed by Aztec, Espresso, Kii Chain and NEAR, plus testnet participation on GenLayer. For Ethereum the company quotes an estimated annual reward of 2.60 to 3.80 percent, and for NEAR it quotes 4.60 to 5.50 percent. Finoa Consensus Services adds that these figures are network snapshots and no guarantee, because participation, inflation, commissions and validator performance change them.

Finoa GmbH is entered in the commercial register of the Potsdam local court under HRB 32451 P, and Christopher May and Sven Niederheide represent the company. Finoa Consensus Services GmbH has its office at Rosenstraße 2 in Berlin, where Daniel Schrader is the managing director. The staking company reports more than two billion dollars in assets under delegation at its peak and holds a AAA rating from StakingRewards.

Slashing is the penalty a proof-of-stake network imposes when a validator breaks its rules, for example by signing two conflicting blocks, and it destroys part of the stake. Finoa Consensus Services runs bare-metal servers in Germany with backup validators in the cloud and an engineer on call around the clock, so that validators stay online. The protocol risk itself stays with the delegator, so an institution checks the slashing rules of each network before it commits assets.