The Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon), the world's largest custodian bank with approximately $ 41 trillion in assets, announced on Thursday 11 February that it has opened a new custody division for cryptocurrencies.
“The platform we build will serve any of these assets,” said Mike Demissi, head of innovation at BNY Mellon. “We will choose them depending on the interest and demand of the clients. At the same time, we will closely monitor the regulation to ensure that we only support those assets that are approved in a specific market. ”
The bank will cooperate with several crypto custody companies. Demissi added that the bank will use the services of external partners, but said it was "not yet ready to disclose any names." “We are not building it entirely from scratch,” he added.
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BNY Mellon is known to have partnered with the Bakkt cryptocurrency platform to “geographically disperse” private keys.
“We start with the basics. The backbone of this market is storage, ”said Demissi. “In the future, everything will depend on our clients. So in the long term, it will not be just storage - they can use them for lending. We are also considering issuing digital assets - tokenized securities or real assets."