The leading financial service provider, State Street, is seeking opportunities to custody crypto assets by the end of the year, mainly focusing on tokenization. The company has been working on improving efficiency and accessibility for its 2023 plans.
It will leverage distributed ledger technology to tokenize funds and private assets. Nicole Olson, vice president of digital product development and innovation at the bank, said that Tokenization is exciting because there’s a significant opportunity for State Street to play and for its clients.
She went on to say, it’s broadly adding digital tech to those more traditional assets and bringing them into the future. With this initiative, State Street aims to accelerate its efforts to focus on digital assets.
In July 2021, Lukka Inc. partnered with State Street to offer crypto services to its private-fund clients. Recently, it also entered into a licensing agreement with Copper.co to launch digital custody offerings for institutions. Copper.co offers custody, trading, and settlement solutions across 450 crypto assets and over 40 exchanges.
Olson mentioned that now State Street Digital intends to offer the ability to custody some of the “blue chip” crypto assets such as Bitcoin and Ether by the end of 2022. However, tokenization remains the focus as the company seeks to add blockchain-based rails to funds and private assets.
Olson emphasized that tokenization can allow shares of the fund to be freely traded on a digital ledger. This will make the process seamless and more efficient for the end investor and the fund issuer alike.
Tokenizing private assets can solve problems around accessibility in the secondary market and liquidity in those assets, she added.
