727 FinanceThe digital asset custody industry has experienced explosive growth within a year, with the number of compliant custodians in Europe surging fourfold, and giants such as Standard Chartered and Citi accelerating their entry. The pure custody model has hit its ceiling, and institutions such as Anchorage and BitGo are leveraging U.S. trust bank charters to transform across sectors into stablecoin issuance, active asset management, and AI agent services, seizing the next golden era of crypto institutional finance.
Author: Ekko An (Tiger Research)
Compiled by: TechFlow
TechFlow Introduction: Over the past year, the digital asset custody industry has experienced explosive expansion. With the number of MiCA-licensed custodians in Europe quadrupling and Wall Street giants such as Standard Chartered and Citi racing to enter the market, the underlying security foundation for on-chain assets has begun to take shape. However, the traditional custody model of charging basis-point fees solely based on assets under custody (AUC) is rapidly hitting the ceiling of commercial growth.
To break free from the profit constraints of a single fee rate, leading crypto-native institutions are following the century-long evolution path of traditional finance and accelerating their transformation into "trust services" with fiduciary duties and asset disposal authority. History is strikingly similar: in the 19th century, Boston safe deposit companies grew into trust banks by moving into estate and bond collateral management, while State Street likewise leveraged its fund custody foundation to incubate the world's first ETF and an index asset management empire.
Today, Anchorage, BitGo, Agora, and Catena have all obtained or applied for national trust bank charters from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), fully opening up stablecoin issuance, block trade clearing and settlement, investment advisory, and even autonomous asset management for AI agents. As secure asset custody becomes merely a ticket to homogeneous competition, whoever can build a high-value-added closed loop of capital services on the back of trust charters will lead the next golden age of crypto institutional finance.
Key Points
The digital asset custody market has grown rapidly over the past year, with the number of compliant custodians under Europe's MiCA framework increasing more than fourfold, surging from 50 to 230.
The custody business primarily charges service fees proportionally based on the scale of assets held, a model that limits its revenue ceiling; trust services, which grant institutions the authority to directly manage and invest such assets, are becoming the core direction of the next stage of evolution.
Looking at the history of traditional finance, safe deposit companies initially expanded from mere secure safekeeping to estate management and bond collateral management, and State Street subsequently leapt from fund asset custody to active investment management; this classic evolution path is being fully replayed in the digital asset sector.
Anchorage and BitGo are expanding into stablecoin issuance and clearing and settlement, while Agora and Catena are going all-in on investment advisory and asset management; all four institutions have obtained or are applying for national trust bank charters across the United States to broaden their business boundaries.
The core competitiveness of future custodians will no longer depend solely on the scale of assets under custody they control, but increasingly on the depth of value-added financial services they can provide to clients.
The Rapid Growth of the Crypto Custody Industry Over the Past Year
A year ago, Tiger Research noted in its report "The Custody Industry Growth You May Have Overlooked" that custody services are the core cornerstone of the entire digital asset industry. At the time, however, custody services focused on holding and securely managing assets had not attracted sufficient market attention.
Over the past year, the number of enterprises flooding into the crypto custody market has shown explosive momentum. In Europe, the number of compliant custodians licensed under the EU's comprehensive crypto regulatory framework MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets) has grown more than fourfold, soaring from an initial 50 to 230.
Meanwhile, major traditional financial institutions globally have also been deploying heavily: Standard Chartered has made a major push through the acquisition of a specialized custodian, and Citigroup has publicly announced that it will officially launch its dedicated custody business within the year.
This dramatic shift directly reflects the continued expansion of on-chain asset scale. According to statistics from RWA.xyz, the scale of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) surged 85% this year alone, climbing to approximately $39.8 billion.
The total market capitalization of stablecoins grew by more than 50% within 2025 alone, crossing the $300 billion mark in one stroke and having since remained near that level. Because both tokenized assets and stablecoins mandate that underlying assets be placed under compliant custody, custody demand has naturally risen accordingly.
However, the rush of institutions into the space is by no means merely to grab a share of the basic custody business. Pure custody revenue mainly comes from proportional fees levied on assets under custody, which severely limits the business ceiling.
Therefore, forward-looking institutions are using existing custody client relationships as a springboard to accelerate their extension into trust services to substantially boost profitability.
Institutions focus on custody in the short term to capture surging compliance demand, while in the medium and long term they use it as a foundation from which to leap across into high-value-added business territory such as trusts.
Custody vs. Trust Services: From Asset Safekeeping to Asset Management
Figure: A comprehensive comparison of the core dimensions of custody and trust services
Custody and trust services are often conflated by outsiders. Although both involve holding client assets, the legal responsibilities and business substance borne by the service providers are vastly different.
Custody is a basic service of securely holding assets on behalf of clients. Clients always retain legal ownership of the assets, and the custodian's role is strictly limited to secure safekeeping and transferring assets per instructions.
By contrast, in a trust structure, the settlor (client) transfers ownership of the assets to the trustee (trust company), which autonomously manages, invests, and disposes of and distributes the assets according to the specific purpose for which the trust was established.
Any returns generated by these assets accrue in full to the beneficiaries designated by the settlor. The trust company operates much like a trustee managing a family's wealth: responsible for investment growth and distributing returns to family members at agreed milestones.
Because trust companies can make independent management and investment decisions regarding the underlying assets, they legally bear a fiduciary duty to place beneficiaries' interests first.
In short, although both involve holding client assets, custody focuses on passive secure safekeeping, while trust services focus on active asset management and investment operations.
The Replay of Historical Cycles: From Asset Safekeeping to Trust Services
To date, the vast majority of digital asset custody services still keep their core focus on the secure storage of assets. In the industry's early stage, custody demand mainly came from spot and contract trading, scenarios that do not require complex asset management structures.
However, as financial products based on real-world assets (RWA) become increasingly widespread, mere secure storage can no longer satisfy the market's urgent demand for deeper trust functions (such as yield generation and collateral liquidation).
This evolutionary process closely mirrors the development trajectory of traditional financial history. During the American Civil War, the U.S. government began issuing Treasury bonds on a large scale, driving a sharp increase in the number of ordinary individual investors holding securities.
To safely store these bonds, investors began renting safe deposit boxes, spawning the early prosperity of professional safe deposit companies. However, as client asset scale and needs grew increasingly diverse, mere physical safekeeping quickly hit its ceiling, pushing these companies to expand comprehensively into trust business.
The Evolution of Safe Deposit Companies: From Physical Safekeeping to Estate and Collateral Management
Figure: The path by which traditional safe deposit companies expanded personal and corporate client services through trust functions
The safe deposit companies of Boston and Rochester are typical representatives in traditional finance of successfully moving from secure safekeeping into the trust domain. As the wealth pain points facing clients extended beyond mere safekeeping, these companies naturally expanded their service scope.
For individual clients, the core pain point is asset inheritance. When a client dies, securities stored in safe deposit boxes often face lengthy estate disputes or a management vacuum.
To solve this problem, safe deposit companies established trust structures to manage the decedent's estate as trustee, distributing income periodically to the surviving spouse for life through investment operations, and passing the principal in full to the next generation of children after the spouse's death.
For corporate clients, the core pain point is bond collateral management. When a company issues bonds to raise financing, it must place the corresponding collateral assets with a neutral third party and protect bondholders' legal rights in the event of default.
In 1883, the Boston Safe Deposit Company formally served as trustee responsible for managing the bond collateral of the American Rapid Telegraph Company. This was also an important milestone in the history of traditional finance for safe deposit companies expanding corporate trust functions.
These historical cases show that safe deposit companies gradually forged themselves into modern trust banks by granting statutory trust functions on top of their existing safekeeping business.
Since clients already trusted these institutions highly and were willing to entrust assets to them for safekeeping, they were naturally more inclined to authorize them to continue managing those assets. This also points to a path forward for today's digital asset custodians: solving clients' unmet deeper financial needs.
The State Street Paradigm: From Fund Asset Custody to Active Asset Management
Figure: State Street's evolution from fund custody to index management and ETF trustee business
State Street is the industry benchmark for moving from pure fund asset custody to direct active investment management.By combining asset custody and asset management into one, State Street was able to deliver comprehensive financial services to clients across the board. Institutional clients that had originally entrusted it merely with safekeeping of funds began confidently delegating assets to State Street for professional investment management.
State Street's initial asset management business likewise grew out of the core capabilities it had accumulated in its day-to-day custody operations. Having long been responsible for fund valuation, accounting, and bookkeeping, State Street built extremely precise hands-on experience in handling portfolios that track market indices.
Leveraging this advantage, State Street established a dedicated index management department for institutional investors in 1978, formally opening the curtain on its active asset management business.
Thereafter, State Street continued to broaden the audience for its products. In 1993, State Street teamed up with the American Stock Exchange to launch SPY, the world's first exchange-traded fund tracking the S&P 500 index, and served as trustee itself.
State Street fully leveraged the deep technical barriers it had built up through routine custody work—trade clearing, interbank settlement, and fund valuation—to construct an operational moat that traditional asset management giants found hard to match.
Today's digital asset custodians can follow the same paradigm: mining from the on-chain assets they hold and the client ecosystems they serve deeply the next stage's most explosive asset management business loop.
How Digital Asset Custodians Are Evolving Across Borders into Trust Services
Current digital asset custody institutions are accelerating their departure from the simple private-key safekeeping framework, advancing comprehensively into integrated trust businesses.
The most representative pioneers among them are Anchorage, BitGo, Agora, and Catena. The first two are actively moving into stablecoin issuance and clearing and settlement channels, while the latter two are focusing entirely on investment advisory and active asset management.
More critically, all four institutions have formally obtained or are actively applying for a national trust bank charter from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), using it as the core compliance lever for expanding their business footprints.
Anchorage and BitGo: Layering Bank-Grade Financial Services on a Custody Foundation
Figure: The matrix of bank-grade value-added businesses Anchorage and BitGo are expanding through national trust bank charters
Safe deposit box companies in history once used trust charters to transform from physical safekeeping into trust banks. In today's digital asset sector, Anchorage and BitGo are evolving along an almost identical trajectory.
Both institutions have obtained nationwide legal charters to provide both trust and custody services: Anchorage was the first to reorganize as a national trust bank as early as January 2021, and BitGo also completed a substantive breakthrough in obtaining a nationwide trust bank charter in December 2025.
Backed by their national trust bank compliance qualifications, their business matrices have expanded from initial Bitcoin and Ethereum products for institutional clients to comprehensively cover real-world assets (RWA) and the stablecoin ecosystem.
Today, their competitors are no longer limited to other crypto-native custodians. Leveraging trust charters, they can compete directly with traditional Wall Street majors in areas such as stablecoin issuance, block trade settlement, staking yield distribution, and on-chain collateral custody.
As spot Bitcoin ETFs, tokenized RWA assets, and stablecoin scale grow exponentially, institutional clients' demand for large-value secure settlement and on-chain staking yields is also rising geometrically.
The assets under custody and compliance reputations the two institutions have accumulated are already sufficient to directly intercept potential client flows from traditional commercial banks in core digital asset areas. Their greatest moat lies in the hundreds of top-tier institutional clients they have deeply bound and the native on-chain settlement and risk control experience accumulated over the years.
By the time traditional commercial banks fully clear internal compliance obstacles and formally enter at scale, Anchorage and BitGo may well have already firmly established an unshakable industry leadership position under the nationwide trust bank framework.
Just as the safe deposit box companies of yesteryear ultimately transformed into modern commercial banking giants, these two institutions are gradually growing into new global-scale banks of the digital age by using trust services as a springboard.
Agora and Catena: From Asset Holding to Active Asset Management
Figure: Agora and Catena are making cross-sector forays into investment advisory and direct asset management through trust structures
State Street once extended the capabilities it accumulated in fund asset safekeeping into asset management and ultimately built a global ETF juggernaut; Agora and Catena are now attempting to replicate this legendary path in the digital asset sector.
On September 18, 2026, both Agora and Catena received conditional preliminary approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish nationwide trust banks.
Currently, the investment advisory and active asset management businesses the two institutions are conducting through trust bank charters are in intensive preliminary preparation, awaiting the final full business commencement license.
Once formally approved, Agora plans to comprehensively deliver on-chain investment opportunity assessment and yield generation advisory to institutional clients, while final buy and sell decisions remain with the clients.
Catena goes further, planning to conduct direct asset management through the nationwide trust bank structure. Its asset management scope will cover not only traditional institutional funds but also, with foresight, take over on-chain digital assets allocated and used by autonomous AI agents.
Their early positioning is of extremely critical strategic significance. In digital asset management, deep understanding of the underlying on-chain ecosystem and hands-on refinement of quantitative risk control models often require years of accumulation.
In complex and intricate DeFi protocols, capturing excess returns through asset lending, liquidity market making, and multi-protocol composable building blocks operates on technical mechanisms entirely different from traditional financial markets.
If traditional financial institutions fail to establish a complete crypto risk management architecture in a timely manner, this professional knowledge gap will only widen further over time.
If Agora and Catena can establish an indisputable on-chain asset management track record ahead of traditional financial institutions and subsequently launch low-threshold compliant products for ordinary investors, they have every opportunity to grow into a new on-chain force comparable to traditional Wall Street asset management giants.
Custody Has Become the Baseline: Preparing for the Next Round of Industry Evolution
Safely holding digital assets remains the very foundation of a custodian's existence. Yet in the future competitive landscape, simple private-key safekeeping will become merely an entry threshold; the real decisive factor will be institutions' ability to build value-added services atop the custody foundation.
As DeFi and RWA markets continue to converge, institutional clients' demands are no longer satisfied with leaving tokens idle in cold wallets; they want to put assets into investment at any time, use them as financing collateral, or circulate them efficiently.
Take tokenized U.S. Treasury funds as an example: investors today seek far more than base interest—they want to use Treasury tokens as collateral to borrow stablecoins and put the borrowed stablecoins into other on-chain arbitrage strategies, maximizing leverage and utility of a single asset across multiple financial links.
For financial institutions, helping clients activate existing assets and embed them into more transaction scenarios carries commercial value no less than creating a new product from scratch.
This likewise opens unlimited imaginative space for crypto custodians. When conducting digital asset investment and high-frequency trading, institutions need, beyond safe custody, efficient asset transfers, cross-chain settlement, and dynamic collateral management services.
A custodian that already firmly controls clients' underlying assets and also possesses a full set of clearing, settlement, and collateral management licenses can naturally play an irreplaceable central role in institutional clients' overall capital landscape.
Trust services are precisely the best compliance vehicle for undertaking these higher-order asset management and investment needs. Trust companies are fully capable of carrying out full-process asset allocation and yield distribution in accordance with clients' commercial intent and trust contract terms.
By expanding business boundaries through nationwide trust banks and affiliated entities—as the leading institutions described above are doing—custodians can fully transform and upgrade step by step to provide all the comprehensive financial services once fragmented among traditional banks, securities firms, and asset managers.
Of course, merely obtaining a trust charter does not automatically guarantee commercial success. Custodians must solidly refine the financial products clients truly need and win market trust with solid investment returns while ensuring absolute asset safety.
Those custodians that first establish practical moats in on-chain asset management and quantitative trading will form a huge first-mover asymmetric advantage over slow-moving traditional financial majors.
A year ago, the entire industry's spotlight was focused on the wild growth of the custody industry itself; today, the core issue has quietly shifted to what potential these institutions holding massive assets can unleash next.
The coming year may become the critical watershed when those pioneering institutions that have long meticulously prepared trust services formally commence operations and aggressively capture territory.If secure custody is merely the admission ticket to participate in the second half of digital finance, then the advanced financial services loop built on trust charters will ultimately determine who can ascend to the industry throne as the king of the next era.