Leading Japanese Bank and Crypto Firms Launch Institutional-Grade Custody Service

Coinshares, the Digital Asset Management firm in the US has partnered with Nomura and Ledger to launch a digital asset custody service. The new firm, Komainu, headquartered in Jersey will be lead by Coinshares CEO, Jean-Marie Mognetti. Komainu’s aim is to develop an institutional-grade custody business. It will support multi-asset support, provide assurance with regulatory compliance and insurance.

Nomura is a financial services group and global investment bank in Japan, while LEDGER is a leading hardware wallet company.  

The CSO of Coinshares, Meltem Demirors, noted in the press release,

As pioneers in this space, we find ourselves playing a role in creating the critical infrastructure needed to bring digital asset investing to the forefront of the financial industry.

She talked about the growth of the custody in the industry apart from crypto exchanges is progressive. She tweeted of the ‘deposit displacement’ in crypto since March as Bitcoin is moving off-crypto exchanges. She tweeted,

thinking a lot about deposit displacement in crypto since march, ~10% of bitcoin “on exchange” moved “off exchange” (see @glassnode data) is this flow going to:

 

• 3rd party custody

• self custody

• new trading venues not included in this dataset

• bad data

This coincides with the increase in institutional interest on Grayscale and an increase in the number of whales hodlers. Demirors notes that the next step in financial services for the crypto industry will be “a market for pricing custodial risk, in the form of a bitcoin overnight rate (LIBOR).” Currently, Coinbase, Gemini and Fidelity Digital Investments are leading the custodial service.

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