BNY Mellon has announced that its Bitcoin custody effort will first launch in the United States and will provide institutional customers with exposure to Bitcoin.
- According to reports, the Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (BNY Mellon) is intending to develop a Bitcoin custody platform.
- BNY Mellon is investigating the possibility of offering this service to its institutional customers in order to enable them to obtain exposure to cryptocurrency.
- Katey Neate, chief risk officer for asset servicing and digital, spoke about the program at a media briefing: “We announced last year that we were standing up for digital asset users. The idea is that we build a digital asset platform, the cornerstone of which is custody that will enable the interoperability of traditional assets and digital.”
Clients will be able to store Bitcoin (BTC) in BNY Mellon “crypto” wallets as part of the bank’s next initiative. Furthermore, the Fireblocks technology will be used to support these digital wallets and other applications.
According to the company, it will also launch its custody platform in the US this year. Regardless, the firm is open to worldwide growth if there is sufficient demand in the industry. In fact, Talia Klein, the director of commercial products for digital asset custody, has stated that the United Kingdom may be the next destination. She phrased it this way:
“I think what we’re seeing in the UK is that there’s a really vibrant and active digital assets market here.”
BNY Melon’s Bitcoin Custody Product
BNY Mellon has been making significant inroads into the Bitcoin industry over the course of the last year. In February of last year, the centuries-old banking behemoth first revealed ambitions to store, transfer, and issue Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as an asset manager for its customers.
Since then, the company has expanded its plans. BNY Mellon established a partnership with cryptocurrency asset management Grayscale Investments later in July. Grayscale Bitcoin Trust would benefit from the relationship since America’s oldest bank would supply a variety of services to them (GBTC).
Using Grayscale’s flagship BTC investment product, investors may get indirect exposure to the world’s most popular digital currency.
Additionally, according to recent reports, BNY Mellon has joined with blockchain data company Chainalysis to assist in the tracking and analysis of cryptocurrency goods. BNY Mellon intends to monitor cryptocurrency transactions by users by integrating Chainalysis’ compliance tools into its risk management system, according to the company.
The ‘Know Your Transaction’ feature of Chainalysis’s suite of tools is presently available, and it sifts through data to identify whether withdrawals or deposits are “high risk.” When the KYT function detects a crypto transfer to a sanctioned wallet address, it may prevent the transaction from being completed.
BNY Mellon presently holds assets in its custody totaling more than $46 trillion dollars. The financial behemoth also happens to be the world’s biggest holder of securities, commodities, and cash, among other things.
