Citi plans digital asset custody service launch with Bitcoin

Citigroup, one of the largest financial institutions on the planet, is preparing to roll out a digital asset custody service that includes Bitcoin. The service is expected to launch by 2026 as part of the bank’s broader Custody+ platform, bringing crypto into the same infrastructure that already holds more than $24 trillion in traditional assets.

What Citi is actually building

The custody service is being developed under Citi’s Integrated Digital Assets Platform, known internally as CIDAP. Nisha Surendran is leading the initiative, which aims to let institutional clients interact with digital assets using the same workflows they already use for stocks, bonds, and other traditional holdings.

The key design choice is a no-wallet, no-private-key system. Clients won’t need to manage seed phrases or worry about the mechanics of blockchain custody. Citi handles that layer entirely, making Bitcoin what the bank describes as “bankable” within a regulated framework.

Beyond pure custody, CIDAP is designed to support tokenization and blockchain connectivity. That means Citi isn’t just building a vault for digital assets. It’s building the plumbing to move tokenized versions of traditional assets alongside native crypto, creating a unified infrastructure that treats both categories as part of the same financial ecosystem.

Why this matters for institutional crypto adoption

The initiative builds on groundwork Citi laid in 2022 through a partnership with Metaco, a digital asset infrastructure provider. That relationship helped the bank develop the custody technology underpinning its current platform. By integrating those capabilities into its existing custody stack rather than spinning up a separate crypto division, Citi is signaling that it views digital assets as an extension of its core business, not a side experiment.

This approach also eliminates a friction point that has kept many traditional investors on the sidelines. Managing private keys requires specialized knowledge and introduces a category of risk that simply doesn’t exist in traditional finance. If you lose your brokerage password, you call customer service. If you lose your private key, your assets are gone forever. Citi’s model removes that asymmetry entirely.

The competitive landscape is heating up

Citi is far from the first major bank to move into digital asset custody, but its scale gives the announcement particular weight. BNY Mellon launched its own digital asset custody platform in 2022. State Street has explored similar offerings. And crypto-native custodians like Coinbase Custody and BitGo have been serving institutional clients for years.

What separates Citi’s approach is integration depth. Rather than offering crypto custody as a standalone product, the bank is embedding it within its existing Custody+ platform. For a large asset manager that already uses Citi for traditional custody, adding Bitcoin becomes a line item rather than a new vendor relationship.

The regulatory environment has also shifted in ways that make this launch more viable than it would have been even two years ago. The approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in early 2024 effectively normalized institutional Bitcoin exposure. Citi’s custody service targets a natural next step: institutions that want direct exposure rather than ETF wrappers.

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