Photo taken from Reuters
Reuters reported on Dec. 12, that banking giant ING is in the process of building out enterprise-grade cryptocurrency custody technology that will help protect digital assets more securely. The custody project is reported to be operating out of its Amsterdam offices, it’s still in its early stages, but will be designed with existing digital assets and newly tokenised traditional assets in mind.
According to a statement ING delivered to Reuters:
“The bank sees increasing opportunities with regard to digital assets on both asset-backed and native security tokens.”
This is something that crypto-economy natives like Coinbase and Binance have long held but one that traditional financial institutions have been slower to grasp. If ING now moves into custodianship of crypto assets, it will be one of very few traditional finance institutions to have done so. The scarcity of custody and other back-office services by brand-name financial companies has been one of the roadblocks to more institutional investments in this new asset class.
Digital asset security is said to be just one of the projects the financial company is working on as it has apparently decided to embrace the future of blockchain and crypto. As the largest bank in the Netherlands, ING is also one of the most active banks in blockchain and has also previously expressed its interest in digital assets and announced that it signed a five-year licensing deal with blockchain platform provider R3. R3 and ING were building on top of permissioned blockchain Corda to roll out enterprise blockchain solutions for the bank’s backend processes.
Major companies are moving into the cryptocurrency industry in different ways, but this latest move by ING, seems to show a support for both the technology and the most notable application of it: cryptocurrency.
