Last week BNY Mellon, the oldest bank in the United States, announced that they would be providing custody solutions, ceding to pressure from institutional investors. Furthermore, documents from December show that Deutsche Bank is also planning a custody solution, along with trading and token issuance services.
Nonetheless, while both banks are well-established and have experience handling a wide range of assets, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re prepared for crypto custody.
As reported by Cointelegraph, Jean-Michel Pailhon, the vice president of business solutions at Ledger, stated:
“Digital assets are totally different than traditional assets like bonds, stocks, and treasury bills. Digital assets are decentralized by design and their ownership is therefore relying on a totally different model that cannot reuse the existing centralized infrastructure of the traditional banking world. To custody crypto assets you need a brand new infrastructure in place.”
If the big banks want to approach security right, they effectively have three options, said Pailhon.
“They can contract with an existing regulated custodian, they can build their own custody infrastructure and get it regulated, or they can buy a custody technology from a vendor and use it and get it regulated.”
He also added:
“The level of efforts and investments required to provide an institution with an enterprise-ready self custody solution is substantially higher than for an individual. It requires slightly different technologies and governance processes to secure billions of dollars in digital assets.”
Regardless of the route the banks take, Pailhon states that it’s a sign of crypto’s growing legitimacy that banks like BNY Mellon plan to provide custody solutions. In addition, as crypto’s total marketcap grows and the value of assets for institutions and even some individuals soars, secure custody solutions will become increasingly important.
“You can’t protect 5, 10, or 50 billion dollars in bitcoin with a garage-based server or an air-gapped computer located in a bunker in the Appalachian mountains. You have to put in place a fully redundant, resilient, secure, certifiable, and auditable custody infrastructure that can scale and empower millions of users and support hundreds of thousands of digital asset transactions in a month. The future success and adoption of digital assets and of the digital asset management industry will depend on this.”