Offchain is an open-source, lightweight program that presents a universal, secure API for transacting with all exchanges. With Offchain, you can consolidate your exchange API keys and manage them from a single place—making it easier to build security policies and workflows on top.
In this blog, we’ll explore the key exchange infrastructure challenges institutions face - from fragmented APIs to custodial risks - and how Offchain addresses them. This article is intended for teams managing institutional exchange access, digital asset custody, and security workflows.
Secure Exchange Withdrawals: API Key Management Best Practices
Since assets are withdrawn on permissionless networks (the blockchains), withdrawals have the tendency to be very permanent. A single incorrect address could mean your funds are permanently lost. That’s why any system that initiates withdrawals must be tightly controlled.
Exchanges nearly all let you do this using API keys. Usually they can be restricted to work only when used from certain IP addresses, but this isn’t foolproof. You want to guard these API keys very closely.
With Offchain, you can centralize how you store and manage your API keys. Offchain becomes the only tool that directly accesses them, while you store the actual keys securely in your preferred secret manager.
To make a withdrawal, you can instead make an intent-based API request to offchain, rather than interacting with an exchange directly. This API is secured using HTTP-signatures, which you can easily configure with Offchain. You can transact with all exchanges using a single, secure credential.
Offchain’s Universal API for Exchange Integration
Another pain point when dealing with exchanges is the inconsistency in their APIs—it's similar to interacting with many different blockchains.
Offchain exposes a universal API to:
- Withdraw funds
- Get deposit addresses
- List balances
- Transfer between sub-accounts
- Check withdrawal/transfer statuses
- List supported assets
Additionally, you can identify assets uniquely across all exchanges using a single symbology. At Cordial Systems, we maintain a universal asset registry and maintain symbols for all exchanges which powers this.
Adding support for new exchanges is incredibly easy (and can even be vibe-coded). If there is any exchange that you need to get added, ping us and we’ll very likely add support for you.
Crosschain Token Support for Exchange Deposits and Withdrawals
Depositing common tokens like USDC is easy since it's supported on many chains. But what if you want to deposit more niche assets?
- BONK → Solana
- TAO → Bittensor
- INJ → Injective
These assets must be deposited on their native chains, which all operate with different infrastructure and wallets.
If you want to be able to store funds off exchange while trading a wide variety of assets, then custody will be a challenging issue for you.
If you are interested in just the chain support, you could use our open-source Crosschain tool to work with everything (supports 50+ blockchains, along with token support, staking, and other native-protocol features). If you want to add full security (MPC wallets + policies), you should look at our Treasury product.
Crosschain isn’t quite part of Offchain, but they are meant to be complements, as they allow you to complete the picture using only simple, open source tools. You could even implement a simple rebalancer tool using only Crosschain and Offchain command-line interfaces.
Offchain + Treasury: Enabling Secure Withdrawal Policies
By itself, Offchain does not currently enforce policies like allowlists or notional limits. It is solely a consolidation of API keys with its own secure API-wrapper. Policies can be built on top, and this is what Cordial Treasury does.
Treasury can be configured to store the Offchain credential as an MPC key. You can then make Transfer requests on Treasury to sign Offchain requests to make withdrawals. These transfer requests on Treasury would be bound by all of the same transfer requests for making blockchain transactions. This allows you to maximize security for interaction with exchanges.
How to Deploy Offchain: Simple Setup for Institutional Use
Offchain is incredibly easy to set up and use. It’s a single binary (programmed in Go) with minimal dependencies and configuration. The only “hard” part is creating the API keys on exchanges.
If you are interested in using Offchain with Cordial Treasury, or want more exchanges added, get in touch with us to request a demo.
