Tiger Research Report: The Next Chapter of the Crypto Industry, From Custody to Trust
Author: Ekko An (Tiger Research)
Translated by: TechFlow
TechFlow Summary: In the past year, the digital asset custody industry has witnessed explosive growth. With the number of custodians holding European MiCA licenses quadrupling, and Wall Street giants like Standard Chartered and Citigroup competing to enter the market, the underlying security foundation for on-chain assets has begun to take shape. However, the traditional custody model, which relies solely on charging basis points based on Assets Under Custody (AUC), is rapidly hitting the ceiling of commercial growth.
To break free from the profit shackles of single-tier fee structures, leading crypto-native institutions are accelerating their transformation into "trust services" that carry fiduciary duties and asset disposition authority, following the evolutionary trajectory of traditional finance over the past century. History bears a striking resemblance: 19th-century Boston safe deposit box companies grew into trust banks by entering the estate and bond collateral management sectors, while State Street similarly leveraged its fund custody foundation to birth the world's first ETF and index asset management empire.
Today, Anchorage, BitGo, Agora, and Catena have obtained or are applying for U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) national trust company charters, comprehensively integrating stablecoin issuance, bulk clearing and settlement, investment advisory, and even autonomous asset management for AI agents. As secure asset custody becomes merely a ticket to homogeneous competition, those who leverage trust charters to build high-value closed-loop capital service ecosystems will dominate the next golden age of institutional crypto finance.
Key Takeaways
The digital asset custody market has seen rapid growth over the past year, with the number of compliant custody institutions under the European MiCA framework surging more than fourfold, from 50 to 230.
Custody business primarily charges fees based on a percentage of held assets, which limits its revenue ceiling; meanwhile, trust services that grant institutions direct management and investment authority over these assets are becoming the core direction of the next phase of evolution.
Throughout traditional financial history, safe deposit box companies gradually expanded from simple secure storage to estate management and bond collateral management, with State Street subsequently leaping from fund custody to active investment management; this classic evolutionary trajectory is being fully replicated in the digital asset space.
Anchorage and BitGo are expanding into stablecoin issuance and clearing/settlement, while Agora and Catena are focusing heavily on investment advisory and asset management. All four institutions are leveraging or applying for U.S. national trust bank charters to broaden their business boundaries.
The core competitiveness of future custody institutions will no longer rely solely on their managed AUC, but rather on the depth of value-added financial services they can provide to clients.
Rapid Growth of the Crypto Custody Industry Over the Past Year
A year ago, Tiger Research pointed out in the research report "The Custody Industry Growth You May Be Ignoring" that custody services are the core cornerstone of the entire digital asset industry. At the time, however, custody services focused on holding and securely managing assets did not attract sufficient market attention.
Over the past year, the number of enterprises flooding into the crypto custody market has surged. In Europe, the number of compliant custody institutions licensed under the EU's comprehensive crypto regulatory framework MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation) has grown more than fourfold, skyrocketing from an initial 50 to 230.
Meanwhile, major global traditional financial institutions are making heavy investments: Standard Chartered is aggressively expanding through acquisitions of specialized custodians, and Citigroup has publicly announced plans to officially launch dedicated custody services within the year.
This drastic shift directly reflects the continuous expansion of on-chain asset scale. According to statistics from RWA.xyz, the scale of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) surged by 85% alone this year, reaching approximately $39.8 billion.
The total market capitalization of stablecoins grew by over 50% in 2025 alone, breaking through the $300 billion mark and maintaining this level since. Since both tokenized assets and stablecoins are mandatorily required to hold underlying assets under compliant custody, demand for custody naturally rises with them.
However, the rush of institutions to enter this space is by no means just to carve up the basic custody business. Pure custody revenue mainly comes from proportional fees charged on the Assets Under Custody, severely limiting the business ceiling.
Therefore, forward-looking institutions are using existing custody client relationships as a springboard, accelerating their extension into trust services to significantly boost profitability.
Institutions focus on custody in the short term to capture surging compliance needs, while in the medium to long term, they use it as a foundation to leap across into high-value-added business landscapes like trusts.
Custody vs. Trust Services: From Asset Safekeeping to Asset Management
Comprehensive comparison of core dimensions between custody and trust services
Custody and trust services are often conflated by outsiders. Although both involve holding client assets, the legal responsibilities and business implications assumed by the service providers differ significantly.
Custody is a foundational service that securely holds assets on behalf of clients. Clients retain legal ownership of the assets at all times, and the custodian's role is strictly limited to secure storage and transferring assets according to instructions.
In contrast, under a trust structure, the settlor (client) transfers asset ownership to the trustee (trust company), which autonomously manages, invests, disposes of, and distributes the assets according to the specific purpose of the trust.
Any returns generated by these assets are fully attributed to the beneficiaries designated by the settlor. Trust companies operate very similarly to trustees managing family wealth: responsible for investment appreciation and distributing returns to family members at agreed-upon intervals.
Because trust companies can make independent managerial and investment decisions regarding underlying assets, they legally bear a fiduciary duty to prioritize the interests of the beneficiaries.
In short, although both involve holding client assets, custody focuses on passive secure safekeeping, while trust services focus on active asset management and investment operations.
Reenactment of Historical Cycles: From Asset Safekeeping to Trust Services
To date, the vast majority of digital asset custody services still center on the secure storage of assets. In the early stages of the industry, custody demand primarily stemmed from spot and futures trading, scenarios that did not require complex asset management structures.
However, as financial products based on real-world assets (RWAs) become increasingly popular, simple secure storage can no longer meet the market's urgent demand for deeper trust functions (such as yield generation and collateral liquidation).
This evolutionary process aligns closely with the developmental trajectory of traditional financial history. During the American Civil War, the U.S. government began issuing large amounts of treasury bonds, driving a sharp increase in the number of ordinary individual investors holding securities.
To safely store these bonds, investors began renting safe deposit boxes, spawning the early prosperity of professional safe deposit box companies. However, as client asset scales and demands became increasingly diverse, pure physical storage quickly hit a ceiling, pushing these companies to fully expand into trust business.
The Evolution of Safe Deposit Box Companies: From Physical Safekeeping to Estate and Collateral Management
How traditional safe deposit box companies expanded personal and corporate client services via trust functions
Safe deposit box companies in Boston and Rochester are typical examples in traditional finance of successfully entering the trust field from secure safekeeping. As the wealth pain points faced by clients exceeded mere safekeeping, these companies naturally expanded their service scope.
For individual clients, the core pain point is asset succession. Upon a client's death, securities stored in safe deposit boxes often face prolonged estate disputes or management vacuums.
To address this, safe deposit box companies established trust architectures to manage inherited estates. Through investment operations, they paid periodic returns to surviving spouses for life, and upon the spouse's death, transferred the principal in full to the next generation of children.
For corporate clients, the core pain point was bond collateral management. When companies issued bonds for financing, they were required to deposit corresponding collateral assets with a neutral third party to protect the legal rights of bondholders in the event of default.
In 1883, the Boston Safe Deposit Company officially served as trustee, responsible for managing the bond collateral of the American Rapid Telegraph Company. This marked an important milestone in traditional financial history for safe deposit box companies expanding into corporate trust functions.
These historical cases show that safe deposit box companies gradually forged themselves into modern trust banks by granting statutory trust functions atop their existing safekeeping businesses.
Since clients already highly trusted these institutions and were willing to entrust them with asset safekeeping, they were naturally more inclined to authorize them to continue managing these assets. This also points out a breakthrough path for today's digital asset custody institutions: addressing clients' unmet deep-level financial needs.
The State Street Paradigm: Leaping from Fund Asset Safekeeping to Active Asset Management
State Street's evolutionary journey from fund custody to index management and ETF trustee business
State Street serves as an industry benchmark for moving from pure fund asset custody to direct active investment management.
By merging asset custody and asset management, State Street was able to deliver comprehensive financial services to clients. Institutional clients who originally only entrusted funds for safekeeping began to confidently delegate their assets to State Street for professional investment operations.
State Street's initial asset management business also emerged from its core capabilities accumulated during daily custody operations. Due to its long-term responsibility for fund valuation, accounting, and bookkeeping, State Street accumulated extremely precise practical experience in handling asset portfolios that track market indices.
Leveraging this advantage, State Street established an index management department specifically for institutional investors in 1978, formally kicking off its active asset management business.
Thereafter, State Street continuously broadened the audience for its products. In 1993, State Street partnered with the American Stock Exchange to launch the world's first exchange-traded fund tracking the S&P 500 index, SPY, serving as its trustee.
State Street fully utilized its profound technical barriers accumulated in daily custody work such as trade clearing, interbank settlement, and fund valuation, building an operational moat that traditional asset management giants found hard to reach.
Today's digital asset custodians can likewise follow this paradigm: mining the most explosive asset management business loops for the next phase from their held on-chain assets and deeply serviced client ecosystems.
How Digital Asset Custodians Are Cross-Evolving into Trust Services
Current digital asset custody institutions are accelerating their escape from the simple private key safekeeping framework, advancing comprehensively and deeply into integrated trust business.
Among them, the most representative pioneering enterprises are Anchorage, BitGo, Agora, and Catena. The former two are actively cutting into stablecoin issuance and clearing/settlement channels, while the latter two are fully focusing on investment advisory and active asset management.
More critically, all four institutions have either officially obtained or are actively applying for U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) national trust bank charters, using them as core compliance footholds to broaden their business landscapes.
Anchorage and BitGo: Layering Bank-Level Financial Services onto a Custody Foundation
Bank-level value-added business matrix expanded by Anchorage and BitGo relying on national trust bank charters
Historical safe deposit box companies once transformed into trust banks relying on trust charters from physical safekeeping. And in today's digital asset sector, Anchorage and BitGo are evolving along almost the exact same trajectory.
Both institutions have obtained U.S. statutory licenses offering dual trust and custody services: Anchorage took the lead in restructuring as a national trust bank in January 2021, and BitGo also achieved a substantive breakthrough in obtaining a national trust bank license in December 2025.
Relying on the compliance qualifications of national trust banks, their business matrices have expanded comprehensively from initially Bitcoin and Ethereum products for institutional clients to real-world asset (RWA) and stablecoin ecosystems.
Today, their competitors are no longer limited to other crypto-native custodians. Relying on trust charters, they can compete directly with traditional Wall Street giants in areas such as stablecoin issuance, bulk transaction settlement, staking yield distribution, and on-chain collateral custody.
With the exponential growth in the scale of spot Bitcoin ETFs, tokenized RWA assets, and stablecoins, institutional clients' demand for large-scale secure settlement and on-chain staking yields has also soared geometrically.
The accumulated asset scale and compliance reputation of both institutions are already sufficient to directly intercept potential client flows from traditional commercial banks in core digital asset areas. Their greatest moat lies in hundreds of top-tier institutional clients deeply bound to them, and years of accumulated native on-chain settlement and risk control experience.
By the time traditional commercial banks completely clear internal compliance obstacles and officially enter en masse, Anchorage and BitGo may have already firmly established an unshakable industry leadership position under the U.S. national trust bank framework.
Just as safe deposit box companies eventually transformed into modern commercial banking giants, these two institutions are gradually growing into entirely new global-tier banks for the digital era, leveraging trust services as a springboard.
Agora and Catena: Moving from Asset Holding to Active Asset Management
Agora and Catena cross-domain layout of investment advisory and direct asset management relying on trust architecture
State Street once extended its capabilities accumulated in fund asset safekeeping to asset management, ultimately creating a globally covering ETF flagship; meanwhile, Agora and Catena are attempting to replicate this legendary path in the digital asset field.
On September 18, 2026, both Agora and Catena received conditional preliminary approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) regarding the establishment of national trust banks.
Currently, the investment advisory and active asset management businesses conducted by both institutions relying on trust bank charters are in a tense preparatory stage, awaiting the final unconditional license for full operation.
Once officially approved, Agora plans to comprehensively provide institutional clients with on-chain investment opportunity assessment and yield generation consulting, while retaining final buy/sell decision-making power with the clients.
Catena goes a step further, planning to conduct direct asset management business relying on the U.S. national trust bank architecture. Its asset management scope will not only cover traditional institutional funds but also prospectively take over on-chain digital assets allocated and used by autonomous AI agents.
Their preemptive positioning holds extremely crucial strategic significance. In the field of digital asset management, a deep understanding of the underlying on-chain ecosystem and the practical refinement of quantitative risk control models often require years of accumulation.
In complex and sophisticated DeFi protocols, capturing excess returns through asset lending, liquidity provision, and multi-protocol modular combinations operates on a technical mechanism completely different from traditional financial markets.
If traditional financial institutions fail to establish a complete crypto risk management architecture for a long time, this professional cognitive gap will only widen further over time.
If Agora and Catena can beat traditional financial institutions to establish undisputed on-chain asset management performance records, and subsequently launch low-barrier compliant products for retail investors, they have a full chance to grow into a new on-chain force rivalling traditional Wall Street asset management giants.
Custody Has Become Baseline: Preparing for the Next Round of Industry Evolution
Securely holding digital assets has always been the lifeline for custody institutions. However, in future competitive landscapes, pure private key secure safekeeping will degenerate into an entry barrier, and the true deciding factor will depend on institutions' ability to build value-added services atop the safekeeping foundation.
As the DeFi and RWA markets continue to merge, institutional clients' demands have long ceased to be satisfied by simply parking tokens in cold wallets; they desire to deploy assets into investments, act as financing collateral, or circulate efficiently at any time.
Taking tokenized U.S. Treasury bond funds as an example, investor demands now go far beyond earning base interest: they hope to use Treasury token collateral to borrow stablecoins, and deploy the borrowed stablecoins into other on-chain arbitrage strategies, achieving maximum leverage and utility for a single asset across multiple financial links.
For financial institutions, helping clients mobilize existing assets and embed them into more trading scenarios holds commercial value no less than creating a new product out of thin air.
This also opens infinite imaginative space for crypto custodians. When institutions engage in digital asset investment and high-frequency trading, besides secure safekeeping, they also require efficient asset transfer, cross-chain settlement, and dynamic collateral management services.
A custody institution that firmly controls clients' underlying assets while simultaneously possessing a full set of clearing/settlement and collateral management licenses can naturally play an irreplaceable central role in the global capital landscape of institutional clients.
And trust services are precisely the best compliance carrier to undertake these high-level asset management and investment demands. Trust companies are fully capable of conducting full-process asset allocation and yield distribution according to clients' business intentions and trust contract agreements.
By relying on U.S. national trust banks and affiliated entities to expand business boundaries, as the leading institutions described earlier have practiced, custody institutions can completely evolve and upgrade to provide all comprehensive financial services previously fragmented among traditional banks, securities firms, and asset management institutions.
Of course, simply obtaining a trust charter cannot automatically guarantee commercial success. Custody institutions must steadily refine financial products that clients truly need, winning market trust with solid investment returns on the premise of ensuring absolute asset security.
Those custodians that pioneer building practical moats in on-chain asset management and quantitative trading will possess a massive asymmetric first-mover advantage over sluggish traditional financial giants.
A year ago, the industry's spotlight was entirely fixed on the rampant growth of the custody industry itself; today, the core topic has quietly shifted to what kind of momentum these institutions, holding massive assets, can release next.
The coming year may well become the critical watershed for pioneering institutions that have meticulously prepared trust services to officially commence operations and launch major campaigns to capture territory.
If secure custody is merely an admission ticket to participate in the second half of digital finance, then the high-end financial service closed-loop constructed relying on trust charters will ultimately determine who climbs to the throne of industry kingmakers in the next era.