Topic
Safekeeping of private keys and management of withdrawal permissions and transaction approvals for financial institutions and corporates.
Strategy and BlackRock's IBIT trust hold 1.65 million bitcoin worth about $140.8 billion, 7.87% of the 21 million cap. Strategy owns its coins as a corporate treasury, while IBIT's belong to a trust whose balance moves with share redemptions.
Reality
CFTC's October 5 notice suggests retail crypto counts as delivered within 28 days only if the customer holds the private keys. That preliminary test would decide whether coins kept on exchange books fall under rules the agency has not yet proposed.
Reality
Partners Banka takes 1.5 points of a 2% markup on each bitcoin trade in its app while Anycoin, a MiCA-licensed exchange, executes and holds the coins. Customers skip wallet keys and exchange logins, but the coins cannot leave the app.
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Hong Kong plans four new licensing regimes for crypto dealing, custody, advisory and management in a bill due before the end of 2026. The bill still has to pass the Legislative Council and no start date has been reported, so a 2027 licensing deadline is, for now, each firm's own estimate.
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BNY is in talks with Kraken parent Payward, valued at $21 billion when Nasdaq invested, over a custody, trading and payments partnership, CoinDesk reported. Nothing is signed. One source compares the talks to the infrastructure half of Payward's Nasdaq agreement.
Perspective Coverage
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Anchorage Digital, the first crypto firm with a national trust charter, has cut 17% of its staff, according to people familiar with internal discussions. It is shrinking while it holds new investor capital and competes with rivals that have since won similar charters.
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ESMA asked the European Commission on September 30 to extend MiCA's ban on non-compliant stablecoins to custody and transfers. Holders who kept such tokens with EU custodians after the 2025 delistings would lose that last licensed option.
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Morgan Stanley, with $9.3 trillion of client assets, has opened a lab to test stablecoins, tokenization and DeFi, according to Crypto Briefing. Its bid to hold and trade crypto itself rests on the national trust bank charter it filed for in February.
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Prosecutors valued the take at 4,100 bitcoin, more than $245 million, drained after one Washington holder granted Google Drive access and read out security codes; every other victim named in the case totals about $14.8 million.
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Head of cryptography Yehuda Lindell says hash-based post-quantum signatures may not split across parties. So Coinbase is researching threshold decryption plus a programmable HSM for the $250 billion it custodies.
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Bastion Platforms won preliminary conditional approval on September 18 to run stablecoin custody, fiat-to-USDC conversion and white-label issuance inside one uninsured national trust bank. The capital and governance conditions still have to be certified.
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Bastion, Catena and Agora are in the OCC's pipeline, and each is selling banks a federally supervised counterparty. The white-label stablecoins, AI-agent accounts and AUSD settlement come attached to the licence.
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Orlen's contractor converted $245m into USDT at Dubai companies and later handed 110m of it to a purported broker on two USB sticks. The Polish government's investigation pins the total lost and spent at $424m.
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Andrej Majcen told Finews that cost was the reason, and the work leaving Switzerland is back office, administration and software development. Client teams stay in Zug, where headcount could fall to about 60.
Perspective Coverage
4 publishersReality
Korea's FIU accepted BitGo Korea's registration on the 18th, the first foreign digital-asset firm to register directly through a domestic subsidiary instead of buying one.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
The Zug firm will cut up to 60 of about 120 Swiss jobs, mostly back office, admin and software, and move that work to Bratislava or Vietnam while group CEO Andrej Majcen says it still has "a substantial cushion".
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LayerZero shipped a lattice-based proof component on Wednesday; Coinbase gathered Bitcoin developers and custodians at Stanford and left without a chosen signature scheme, which is the piece no date can order.
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Builders Bank & Trust would custody bitcoin and stablecoins under one federal supervisor instead of fifty state ones. That is worth paying for. But 23 of the OCC's last 40 applications want much the same thing.
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The in-kind program went from about $3bn in October 2025 to over $5bn in August 2026, and the 25-fold cut in its minimum landed in July, which leaves one month of those ten to carry the acceleration story.
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The transfer is about 2.7% of USDe supply, so size is not the story. The story is that the two parties able to explain a custody event have both said nothing.
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