Digital Asset Custody

Custody is not glamorous work. Settling securities transactions, safekeeping customer assets and collecting entitlements owed to the owners of those assets cannot compare, in terms of column inches and personal rewards, with mergers and acquisitions or the trading floor. Yet custodians have emerged, ironically in an industry created specifically to bypass intermediaries, as the single most important guarantors of investment and trading activity in the cryptocurrency markets.

As cryptocurrencies become a standard part of institutional portfolios, asset managers are increasingly focused on generating sustainable yield—without compromising custody, governance, or risk controls. Watch the Webinar Staking has emerged as a core mechanism to earn yield on proof-of-stake networks, and adoption is accelerating as custodians integrate staking services directly into secure custody frameworks. Beyond staking, certain assets—like Bitcoin—generate yield throug

This article is sponsored by Summer.fi. Learn more at https://summer.fi/ Institutional crypto has largely solved custody. Assets can be held securely, segregated, and audited at scale. What’s changing in 2026 is how owners of digital assets can utilise those same assets across the market to generate yield and, more importantly, who performs the asset management function on assets that have been deployed. A growing number of asset management firms are stepping on-chain not mer

Ripple Custody is giving its customers, and by extension customers of its customers, access to “staking” services provided by Figment Ripple says integrating access to Figment “staking” infrastructure relieves its customers of operational, compliance and reporting demands Figment offers regulated institutional holders of tokens the opportunity to earn an income from validating transactions on Proof-of-Stake blockchains Digital asset custodian Ripple Custody has appointed Fig

BitGo, Fidelity and Stablecoin issuers Circle, Paxos and Ripple have secured national trust bank licences from the OCC The licences will enable the five firms to offer digital asset issuance, trading, staking, settlement and custody services throughout the United States The licence approvals mark a second change in policy direction at the OCC in the last five years The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ( OCC ) in the United States has approved national trust bank lice

As on-chain yield demand accelerates, Summer.fi Institutional is equipping custodians and asset managers with compliant vault infrastructure, unlocking crypto-native yield through automation, transparency, and policy control.

As the digital asset ecosystem matures, institutions face rising threats from cyberattacks, insider risks, and governance gaps. Ledger Enterprise outlines how modern custody solutions — built on hardware-backed protection and embedded governance — can deliver the resilience and transparency institutional investors demand.

Explore the rise of Digital Assets in asset management. Learn how Digital Assets can revolutionize costs and trust in the industry today.

Are specialist intermediaries such as market-makers necessary to generate liquidity in tokenised asset markets? Traditional markets prove that liquidity does not arise naturally from the interaction of issuers and investors, and cannot be sustained by their activities either, but must instead be created by market-makers and sell- and buy-side firms using collateralised credit and asset borrowings to take positions and increase the value of their trades (see Chart 1). So liqui

Digital asset custody: What can possibly go wrong?

How do the risks of digital asset custody differ from the risks of traditional custody? Digital assets are not the same as conventional financial assets, so custodians must master familiar risks in unfamiliar guises, and entirely new risks. The fact that ownership of a digital asset depends on possession of private keys is an obvious difference from registered securities or funds. The keys are routinely sharded into multiple parts which must not only be reassembled as needed

How is the digital asset custody industry evolving? The origins of digital asset custody lie in the initial cryptocurrency boom of 2015-2017. Retail investors needed digital wallets to hold the private keys to their coins, and the cryptocurrency exchanges provided them. Independent digital asset custodians, and vendors of independent digital asset custody technologies, proliferated in 2017 and especially 2018, as the first cryptocurrency bubble inflated and then deflated. At

Custodians have been obliged since 2019 to check that holders of cryptocurrencies and Stablecoins are not money launderers, terrorists or sanctions evaders. (1) What impact have those obligations had on the day-to-day practice of digital asset custodians? Both traditional custodian banks and specialist digital asset custodians have recognised the need to comply with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) obligations to run Anti Money Laundering (AML), Countering the Financi

Why do digital asset custodians exist at all when blockchain was invented to eliminate the need for trusted intermediaries? Issuers and investors, and intermediaries such as asset managers and brokers, are agreed that custodians are essential to secure mainstream adoption of digital assets. Such universal agreement reflects the fact that custodians reassure investors, asset managers and brokers that their assets are safe, and their privacy and confidentiality will be respecte

A single European capital market – a Capital Markets Union (CMU) – could provide European business with a lower cost of capital through...

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