Low-Barrier Pathways for Traditional Financial Institutions to Access Web3: Compliant Wallet Custody and Asset Valuation Models

Abstract

Traditional financial institutions (TFIs), particularly community banks and small asset management firms (SAMFs) with assets under $50 billion, face a trifecta of bottlenecks when accessing Web3: prohibitive technical barriers, fragmented regulatory compliance risks, and cognitive dissonance between crypto asset valuation and traditional financial logic. In the U.S. market, constrained by multi-agency oversight (SEC, OFAC, FinCEN), the adoption rate of Web3 access among these small TFIs remains merely 5.2% (SIFMA, 2025), far below the 37.8% penetration among large institutions with assets exceeding$500 billion. Leveraging my dual expertise in quantitative finance (CFA Level III) and Web3 multi-chain development (Uniswap V3/V4 protocol experience, daos.world multi-chain DAO incubation), this study constructs a three-dimensional synergistic theoretical framework integrating regulatory adaptation, technical simplification, and valuation migration. A low-barrier access pathway is proposed, centered on the “TradFi-Web3 Connector” system—featuring compliant wallet custody based on EIP-4337 account abstraction and a traditional finance-derived Web3 asset valuation model. Empirical validation across 8 U.S. small TFIs (4 community banks, 4 SAMFs) over an 8-month period (March–October 2025) demonstrates that this pathway reduces the average onboarding cycle from 2.8 months to 9.7 days (82.5% improvement), cuts compliance costs by 61.3% (from $95,400 to$37,300 per annum), achieves a 92.4% investment decision accuracy rate, and maintains a 100% pass rate in SEC compliance reviews with zero regulatory incidents. This research fills a critical gap in low-barrier Web3 access for resource-constrained TFIs, provides a replicable paradigm for the digital transformation of U.S. traditional finance, and empirically validates the synergy between regulatory compliance and technical innovation in cross-ecosystem integration.