The Oldest Bank Of America, BNY Mellon Now Supports Cryptocurrencies

In a press statement on Tuesday, Bank of New York Mellon (BK), the oldest lender in the United States and the largest custodian bank in the world, announced the addition of cryptocurrencies to its custody services, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. 

BNY Mellon, is the oldest bank in the United States, with a 238-year history of reliability, tenacity, and invention. In keeping with this, BNY Mellon established an enterprise Digital Assets Unit in 2021 to create solutions for the technology behind digital assets. The unit aims to introduce the first multi-asset platform to connect digital and traditional asset custody.

“Touching more than 20% of the world’s investable assets, BNY Mellon has the scale to reimagine financial markets through blockchain technology and digital assets. We are excited to help drive the financial industry forward as we begin the next chapter in our innovation journey,” said Robin Vince, Chief Executive Officer and President at BNY Mellon, as reported by Marketscreener. 

A recent poll by BNY Mellon reveals the substantial institutional demand for a financial infrastructure that is scalable and designed to support both traditional and digital assets. Almost all institutional investors (91%) expressed interest in investing in tokenized products, according to the poll. Additionally, 41% of institutional investors currently own bitcoin in their portfolios, and another 15% expect to do so in the next two to five years.

To this point, traditional fund managers interested in holding digital assets would typically have had to find a company specializing in cryptocurrency for custody services. These fund managers would normally rely on BNY Mellon (or other custodial lenders) to carry out the necessary back-office tasks related to their typical securities holdings.

As well as performing the other standard bookkeeping tasks, BNY Mellon will now be able to offer those fund managers storage of the keys required to access and move around their bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH).