With America’s oldest bank BNY Mellon recently announcing their plans to store and manage Bitcoin for their clients, industry leaders have high hopes for the major change that this will bring to crypto while also noting that the industry needs to work together to keep the ball rolling.
BNY Mellon made a tweet on February 11, 2021, regarding their Digital Assets unit. BNY Mellon Digital Assets unit is a team focused on “building the first multi-asset custody and administration platform for traditional and digital assets”.
“We are proud to be the first global bank with plans to provide an integrated service for the transferring, safekeeping, and issuing of digital assets”, said Roman Regelman, CEO Asset Servicing and Head of Digital at BNY Mellon.
Digital asset prime broker Bequant’s Head of Institutional Services, Alex Mascioli told Decrypt that this could be a turning point as it may change how asset managers view Bitcoin and other digital assets once their crypto offering is made available later this year.
Guy Hirsch, US Managing Director at eToro, said in an interview with Decrypt that a small portion of BNY Mellon’s institutional customers deciding to allocate to Bitcoin may be all it needs to be significant as “even only one half of one percent of the $41 trillion BNY Mellon oversees is committed to crypto”.
