Custodians: The improbable catalysts of the token revolution?
- 6 hours ago
- 2 min read
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 the technologies and techniques pioneered by the cryptocurrency industry spread to the traditional money and securities markets, the ability of custodians to keep digital assets safe proved the sine qua non of institutional engagement with tokenised assets. Inevitably, this opportunity spawned a host of new independent and exchange-owned digital asset custodians and encouraged the more adventurous traditional custodian banks to develop services to support institutions investing in cryptocurrencies and tokenised assets.
The Future of Finance Digital Asset Custody Directory lists more than 100 digital asset custodians and distinguishes between them by measuring their strengths and weaknesses against more than 80 criteria. The Directory tracks exits as well as entrances (see the chart below) and provides a moving map of an industry apparently in flux yet demonstrably set on a course of convergence between the innovations of the cryptocurrency industry and the experience of traditional custodians.
Nihil sub sole novum, said the Preacher. And much of what passes for innovation in digital asset markets, such as lending customer assets to third parties for gain or posting them as collateral for credit, is long familiar in traditional securities markets. Custodian banks were managing money and securities for their own profit, as well as that of their customers, long before digital asset custodians began to claim that they are in practice asset managers.
So it is not surprising that the annual Future of Finance Digital Asset Custody event, hosted at the Aon Centre in the City of London on 3 December 2025, looked backwards as well as forwards. Panels explored how traditional and digital asset custodians are both different and similar, how custodians support the trading of digital as well as conventional assets, whether digital identities can solve the longstanding problem of clumsy and expensive customer on-boarding, how regulation hinders as well as helps, and how and why the industry is converging on a single model. We hope you find this summary of the day useful and interesting.
