Leading institutional crypto custodian Zodia Custody announced that it will soon start offering its clients yield on their cryptocurrency holdings. The firm, which is backed by multinational investment bank Standard Chartered, has partnered with OpenEden to connect its clients’ crypto assets with real-world opportunities. Announcing its new decision on September 19, 2023, Zodia Custody said that the move will give its institutional clients exposure to staking services.
Zodia Custody CEO Julian Sawyer said while there was a lot in traditional finance that could be moved to digital finance, the challenge was how to make clients benefit from such moves in a “safe and compliant” manner. Sawyer said Zodia Custody’s partnership with OpenEden aimed to bring the benefits of such moves to institutional clients in a “regulatory-first way”.
Standard Chartered and asset servicing firm Northern Trust unveiled Zodia Custody in 2021. Earlier this year, crypto custodian firm Zodia Custody also announced a joint venture with SBU Digital Asset Holdings to build a custody business in Japan. In April, Zodia Custody raised $36 million from Standard Chartered’s venture capital arm, SC Ventures, and SBI Holdings, among others.
Zodia Custody also has a sister concern called Zodia Markets which is an institutional trading platform. In the recent past, Zodia Markets has talked about its plans to ramp up expansion in the US following an uptick in institutional demand.
According to reports, the mechanism of connecting idle crypto assets, especially the Top 10 cryptocurrencies, with real-world assets (RWA) has gained more popularity in crypto markets recently. Helix, which was incubated by Singapore-headquartered private credit business Helicap, recently raised $2 million in pre-seed funding for its RWA protocol.
Open-Eden is a Singapore-based company that was set up by Eugene Ng and Jeremy Ng. Jeremy and Eugene were earlier looking after the Asia Pacific operations and business development in the region for the popular crypto exchange Gemini, respectively. The two parted ways with the firm in December 2021 and launched OpenEden in April this year. The firm announced its plans to bring tokenized US treasury bills on blockchains.
In a statement issued on September 18, 2023, Jeremy said that there were stablecoins worth billions of dollars that could easily be leveraged for earnings yield for their investors.
Just a few weeks ago, Zodia Custody announced that it had made a foray into the Singapore market after noticing an increase in the demand for bank-grade cryptocurrency custody services.
Analysts who have been tracking the market feel that the move is unlikely to have an impact on live cryptocurrency prices.
Disclaimer: This article was created for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. An asset’s past performance does not predict its future returns. Before making an investment, please conduct your own research, as digital assets like cryptocurrencies are highly risky and volatile financial instruments.
