Boston-based US bank State Street is partnering with Copper.co to offer crypto custody services for institutional clients.
Summary
State Street enters the crypto sector
Bloomberg reports that the bank wants to have an infrastructure in place to enable digital wallet custody services for its institutional clients by the end of this year.
Moreover, this would only be the first step in the bank’s expansion into the cryptocurrency sector, having launched a dedicated digital division in June 2021.
State Street Digital chief Nadine Chakar said:
“Today we’re talking custody, but sky’s the limit”.
State Street is one of the largest US banks
State Street Corporation is a US bank founded as early as 1792 in Boston. It is listed on the NYSE, and is one of the largest asset management companies in the world, with $4.1 trillion in assets under management and $43.7 trillion in custody and administration.
It is so big that it was included by the Financial Stability Board in the list of “too big to fail” banks.
Institutional investors choose banks for cryptocurrencies
The Copper deal clearly shows how this secular bank is embracing cryptocurrencies, as its new infrastructure will allow it to store for example Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Solana and Polkadot.
The thing is that institutional clients have such high regulatory standards that they cannot be too exposed, but they are still interested in cryptocurrencies.
These investors prefer to entrust the physical management of the tokens to some regulated, well-equipped and insured entity, so that they have neither regulatory nor technical problems.
For this reason, even secular banks like State Street are basically forced to integrate crypto services, otherwise they risk losing large institutional clients, or seeing their funds under management reduced.
By now, cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin in particular, have become so much a part of the global financial system that no major investor can really imagine being able to stay out of it completely.
For this type of investor, the only solution is to rely on solid, reliable, financially well-covered structures, and perhaps with a long and powerful reputation to uphold.
