Altus Formalizes ‘Institutional Blockchain Foundry’ Business for Financial Firms

Altus, a South Korean blockchain company formerly known as B-Harvest, is formalizing a business focused on helping financial institutions build and operate blockchain services. The company aims to become a digital-asset infrastructure partner for financial firms by drawing on expertise built over the past eight years.

Altus said on June 18 that it was officially defining its business identity to target demand from domestic institutions adopting blockchain technology. It described that identity as an “institutional blockchain foundry.”

The company is emphasizing that positioning because it believes blockchain’s core value lies in improving existing financial services. “If institutions want to evolve financial infrastructure through blockchain, a partner that only understands technology is not enough,” Chief Executive Officer Lee Hyoung-yeon said. A suitable partner must understand both blockchain technology and the context of the financial industry, while also bringing experience from global markets into live systems, he said.

Many blockchain initiatives still have not advanced beyond proof-of-concept projects into live services. While demand from financial institutions is growing, commercializing those services requires both technical expertise and a deep understanding of the financial industry. It also calls for hands-on experience designing, building and operating digital-asset financial products such as real-world asset tokenization, stablecoin payments and on-chain trading.

Eight Years of Finance and Blockchain Experience

For financial institutions, blockchain projects are more than a simple technology rollout. Altus said blockchain adoption involves complex decisions tied to customer assets, transaction stability and regulatory compliance. Systems that work in test environments often differ from those that can operate in live markets.

Altus said its accumulated technical capabilities position it to meet rising institutional demand. Since its founding in 2018, the company has continued research and development in core blockchain technology and financial infrastructure for about eight years. It said its experience implementing and operating blockchain-based financial functions including mainnets, payments, tokenization and trading can serve as a foundation for helping institutional clients commercialize services.

Turnkey Public Mainnet Buildout Experience

Altus said its key competitive edge is the know-how it has built over eight years. The company has handled four public mainnet projects, including Stable, AULT and Canto, on a turnkey basis from design through operations. Based on that experience, it is positioning itself as a long-term partner that can support institutions from the planning stage of a blockchain business through infrastructure buildout, operations and upgrades.

“In traditional finance, technology has been closer to a tool for improving operational efficiency,” Lee said. In blockchain, however, business needs are more deeply tied to the technology’s potential, he said. Without a detailed understanding of the synergies between blockchain and traditional financial services, it is difficult to design practical solutions.

The company also cited its experience designing, building and operating financial products on blockchain infrastructure as another strength. Altus said it has implemented functions such as real-world assets, stablecoin payments and on-chain trading across four blockchains.

More specifically, the company said it designed tokenization systems backed by physical assets including silver, as well as Bitcoin-based tokenization systems, and established operating frameworks that met regulatory requirements. It also said it designed a cross-border payments blockchain based on Tether’s USDT stablecoin, creating infrastructure that allows global payment service providers to process international payments more efficiently. Altus has also built and operated an order book-based on-chain spot and futures trading platform.

Pursuing Long-Term Technology Partnerships

Altus said institutional digital-asset businesses should aim for integrated services. Functions tied to digital assets — from token issuance and investor management to trading, collateral, payment, settlement and redemption — may appear separate, but in live service environments they need to work as a single, consistent flow. The company said its experience operating mainnets as well as blockchain-based services in payments, tokenization and trading supports that kind of integrated service design.

“When institutions adopt blockchain, they need more than infrastructure development,” an Altus official said. They also need an understanding of business objectives, workflow design, and regulatory and operational risks, the official said. Because Altus has worked across both digital-asset infrastructure and financial products, it can design and implement each function as part of one end-to-end flow.

The Forward Deployed Engineering, or FDE, model is another part of that pitch. Altus describes FDE as a form of embedded engineering in which it participates from the design stage, when business goals and direction are being set, and supports partners through system buildout, operations and feature expansion. Unlike outsourced development that ends after a system is delivered to a client, Altus said it remains responsible for projects over the long term, from design to operations and further upgrades.

The company said it adopted the FDE model because, in blockchain infrastructure, responding quickly to security issues, protocol upgrades and changes in global financial markets matters more than the initial buildout. “Technology systems need to be designed around precise business logic and objectives, and they need to keep evolving,” Lee said. That requires long-term, close cooperation with clients, he added.

The FDE model also gives partner companies a chance to build their own blockchain technology and business know-how. Rather than relying on one-off outsourced development to solve isolated problems in existing services, the structure allows both sides to design future improvements together. Altus said that is another reason it emphasizes long-term partnerships.

More than half of Altus’s roughly 40 employees are senior engineers. The team includes people with experience at Kakao, Samsung Electronics, KB Kookmin Bank, Deutsche Bank and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute. The company said that mix reflects its business model, which is focused on financial blockchain infrastructure.

Lee, who heads Altus, studied mathematics at POSTECH and earned a master’s degree in finance from the University of Reading before working at South Korean financial institutions including Meritz Securities. He said he has focused on bringing together talent from finance and blockchain into one team. To build an organization optimized for FDE, Altus has placed particular emphasis on logical thinking and client communication, he said.