Deloitte, one of the Big Four auditing majors, is planning a major Web3 push into its existing client services portfolio. On Tuesday, the London-based global consultancy giant, absorbed crypto infrastructure provider Blocknative as a crucial step to advance its Web3-centric plans. The startup headquartered in San Francisco has started to wind down its operations, it said in an official announcement.
This acquisition entails the absorption of the Blocknative team into Deloitte, making it an “acqui-hire” arrangement. The financial details about the acquisition remain undisclosed.
Founded in 2018, Blocknative offered services like real-time blockchain transaction management as well as monitoring solutions for public blockchain networks. For Deloitte, the Blocknative team would be working to bring Web3 technologies across its legacy client portfolio services.
Deloitte, which provides professional services and tech implementation advisory to a majority of the Fortune Global 500 companies, has essentially kickstarted a Web3 push from its end into legacy corporate ecosystems through its acquisition of Blocknative.
Elaborating on what Deloitte has in plans for Blocknative’s team, the latter said, “Agentic AI is moving into large organizations faster than the infrastructure and controls that support it. The trust, coordination, and verification gaps that follow are the kinds of problems blockchains and cryptographic systems are built to address. Inside Deloitte, our research and engineering work will be applied to those needs as they emerge.”
Blocknative has informed its existing users that its API services will stop working after June 19. Its Gas Network — that served as a decentralized platform to unify multi-chain gas fee data and bring Web3 fee markets on-chain — will also cease operations on the same date.
For Deloitte, this step sits in alignment with the other crypto-centric services that it has started offering in recent times. For instance, Deloitte has laid major focus on offering consultations around the tokenization of real world assets (RWAs). The company also provides other crypto services like stablecoin accounting and proof-of-reserves verifications for exchanges. Coinbase is Deloitte client.