Tiger Research Report: The Crypto Industry's Next Chapter, From Custody to Trust Services

Author: Ekko An (Tiger Research)

Compiled by Deep潮 TechFlow

DeepChaohao Overview: Over the past year, the digital asset custody industry has experienced explosive growth. With the number of MiCA-licensed custodians in Europe quadrupling and major Wall Street players like Standard Chartered and Citibank entering the market, the foundational security infrastructure for on-chain assets has begun to take shape. However, the traditional custody model, which relies solely on asset-under-management (AUM) to generate basis point fees, is rapidly hitting a ceiling for commercial growth.

To break free from the profit constraints of a flat fee model, leading crypto-native institutions are accelerating their transformation into “trust services” with fiduciary duties and asset management authority, following the century-old evolution of traditional finance. History echoes strikingly: in the 19th century, Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company grew into a trust bank by entering estate and bond collateral management, while State Street similarly built its global ETF and index asset management empire on its fund custody foundation.

Today, Anchorage, BitGo, Agora, and Catena have either obtained or applied for the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) national trust bank charter, fully enabling stablecoin issuance, large-scale clearing and settlement, investment advisory services, and autonomous asset management for AI agents. As secure asset custody becomes a baseline requirement for market entry, those who leverage their trust charter to build high-value capital service ecosystems will lead the next golden age of institutional crypto finance.

The digital asset custody market has experienced rapid growth over the past year, with the number of compliant custody providers under Europe’s MiCA framework increasing more than fourfold, from 50 to 230.

The custody business primarily charges service fees proportional to the value of assets held, a model that limits its revenue potential; in contrast, trust services that grant institutions direct control and investment authority over these assets are becoming the core direction of the next phase of evolution.

Throughout the history of traditional finance, safekeeping companies initially expanded from simple secure storage to estate management and bond collateral management, and State Street subsequently evolved from fund asset custody to active investment management; this classic trajectory is now being fully replayed in the digital assets space.

Anchorage and BitGo are expanding into the stablecoin issuance and settlement space, while Agora and Catena are fully focusing on investment advisory and asset management services. All four institutions have either依托 or are in the process of applying for a nationwide trust bank charter to broaden their business scope.

The core competitiveness of future custodians will no longer depend solely on the scale of assets under custody, but rather on the depth of value-added financial services they can provide to their clients.

A year ago, Tiger Research pointed out in its research report, "The Custody Industry Growth You May Have Overlooked," that custody services are the foundational cornerstone of the entire digital assets industry. However, at that time, custody services focused on holding and securely managing assets had not received sufficient market attention.

Over the past year, the number of companies entering the crypto custody market has surged. In Europe, the number of compliant custody providers licensed under MiCA, the EU’s comprehensive crypto regulatory framework, has more than quadrupled, rising from an initial 50 to 230.

Meanwhile, major traditional financial institutions worldwide are making significant moves: Standard Chartered Bank has entered the market aggressively through acquisitions of specialized custodial firms, and Citigroup has publicly announced it will officially launch its dedicated custodial services this year.

This dramatic shift directly reflects the ongoing expansion of on-chain asset volumes. According to statistics from RWA.xyz, the total value of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) surged by 85% this year alone, reaching approximately $39.8 billion.

The total market capitalization of stablecoins grew by more than 50% within a single year in 2025, surpassing the $300 billion mark and subsequently remaining near that level. As both tokenized assets and stablecoins require underlying assets to be held in compliant custody, demand for custody services has naturally increased.

However, various institutions are rushing in not merely to profit from basic custody services. Pure custody revenue primarily comes from fees based on a percentage of assets under custody, which severely limits the business's ceiling.

Therefore, forward-looking institutions are leveraging their existing custodial client relationships as a springboard to rapidly expand into trust services, significantly boosting profitability.

In the short term, institutions focus on custody to capture the surge in compliance demand, while in the medium to long term, they use it as a foundation to expand into higher-value business areas such as trusts.

Chart: Comprehensive comparison of core dimensions of custodial and trust services

Custodial and trust services are often confused by outsiders. Although both involve holding client assets, the legal responsibilities and business implications assumed by the service providers are significantly different.

Custody is a foundational service that securely holds assets on behalf of clients. Clients always retain legal ownership of their assets, 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 ownership of the assets to the trustee (trust company), which then independently manages, invests, and distributes the assets according to the specific purposes outlined in the trust agreement.

Any income generated by these assets will fully belong to the beneficiary designated by the principal. The trust company operates similarly to a trustee managing family wealth: responsible for investment growth and distributing income to family members at agreed-upon intervals.

Because trust companies have the authority to independently manage and make investment decisions regarding the underlying assets, they legally bear a fiduciary duty to prioritize the beneficiaries' interests.

In short, although both involve holding client assets, custody focuses on passive secure storage, while trust services emphasize active asset management and investment operations.

To date, the vast majority of digital asset custody services continue to focus primarily on the secure storage of assets. In the early stages of the industry, custody needs mainly arose from spot and futures trading, scenarios that did not require complex asset management structures.

However, as financial products based on real-world assets (RWA) become increasingly popular, simple secure storage no longer meets the market's urgent demand for deeper trust functions, such as yield generation and collateral liquidation.

This evolution closely aligns with the historical development of traditional finance. During the American Civil War, the U.S. government began issuing government bonds on a large scale, leading to a sharp increase in the number of individual investors holding securities.

To securely store these bonds, investors began renting safety deposit boxes, sparking the early growth of professional safe-deposit-box companies. However, as client asset sizes and needs became increasingly diverse, physical storage alone quickly reached its limits, prompting these companies to fully expand into trust services.

Chart: Traditional safe companies expand personal and corporate client service pathways through trust functions.

Boston and Rochester Trust Companies, traditional financial institutions that successfully expanded into the trust sector from secure asset custody, naturally extended their service offerings as their clients’ wealth concerns moved beyond mere storage.

For individual clients, the core pain point is asset succession. After a client’s passing, securities stored in safes often face prolonged estate disputes or a management vacuum.

To address this issue, the custodian company has established a trust structure to manage the deceased’s estate, providing lifelong periodic income payments to the surviving spouse through investment operations, and transferring the full principal to the next generation of children upon the spouse’s passing.

For corporate clients, the core pain point is bond collateral management. When companies issue bonds to raise capital, they must deposit the 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 and Trust Company officially became the trustee responsible for managing the collateral bonds of the American Rapid Telegraph Company, marking a significant milestone in the history of traditional finance for safe deposit companies expanding into corporate trust services.

These historical examples show that safe deposit companies gradually evolved into modern trust banks by adding fiduciary responsibilities to their existing custody services.

Since clients already have high trust in these institutions and are willing to entrust them with asset custody, they are also more likely to authorize these institutions to continue managing these assets. This points the way forward for today’s digital asset custodians: addressing clients’ unmet deeper financial needs.

Chart: State Street Bank's Evolution from Fund Custody to Index Management and ETF Trustee Services

State Street has become an industry benchmark, transitioning from passive fund asset custody to direct active investment management.

By integrating asset custody with asset management, State Street is able to deliver comprehensive financial services to its clients. Institutional clients, who previously only entrusted their funds for safekeeping, now confidently entrust State Street with professional investment management.

State Street's initial asset management business also evolved from core capabilities developed through its daily custody and operational activities. Having long been responsible for fund valuation, accounting, and bookkeeping, State Street gained highly precise practical experience in managing portfolios that track market indices.

Leveraging this advantage, State Street Bank established an index management division specifically for institutional investors in 1978, officially marking the beginning of its active asset management business.

Subsequently, State Street continued to expand the audience for its products. In 1993, State Street partnered with the American Stock Exchange to launch SPY, the world’s first exchange-traded fund tracking the S&P 500 Index, with State Street serving as trustee.

State Street leverages its deep technological advantages accumulated through daily custody operations—including trade settlement, interbank clearing, and fund valuation—to build an operational moat that traditional asset management giants cannot match.

Today’s digital asset custodians can similarly follow this paradigm: uncovering the next most explosive asset management business loop by leveraging their on-chain assets and deep client ecosystems.

Current digital asset custodians are rapidly moving beyond mere private key storage, fully advancing into comprehensive trust services.

The most representative pioneering companies in this space are Anchorage, BitGo, Agora, and Catena. The first two are actively entering the stablecoin issuance and settlement clearing channels, while the latter two are fully focused on investment advisory and active asset management.

More importantly, all four institutions have either officially obtained or are actively pursuing a national trust bank charter from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) as a core compliance strategy to expand their business footprint.

Chart: The bank-grade value-added service matrix expanded by Anchorage and BitGo through their state trust bank charters

Historically, safe deposit companies leveraged trust charters to evolve from physical storage providers into trust banks. Today, in the digital assets space, Anchorage and BitGo are following nearly the same trajectory.

Both institutions have obtained full U.S. state licenses to provide trust and custody services: Anchorage became a national trust bank as early as January 2021, and BitGo achieved a significant breakthrough in obtaining a national trust bank license in December 2025.

Leveraging the regulatory credentials of the National Trust Bank, their business offerings have expanded comprehensively from initial Bitcoin and Ethereum products for institutional clients to include real-world assets (RWA) and the stablecoin ecosystem.

Today, their competitors are no longer limited to other crypto-native custodians. With their trust charter, they can directly compete with traditional Wall Street giants in areas such as stablecoin issuance, large-volume trade settlement, staking reward distribution, and on-chain collateral custody.

As Bitcoin spot ETFs, RWA tokenized assets, and stablecoins experience exponential growth, institutional clients' demand for large-volume secure settlement and on-chain staking yields is rising geometrically.

The asset scale and compliance reputation accumulated by these two institutions are sufficient to directly intercept the potential customer flow of traditional commercial banks in the core digital assets sector. Their greatest moat lies in their deeply entrenched relationships with hundreds of top-tier institutional clients, along with years of accumulated native on-chain settlement and risk management expertise.

By the time traditional commercial banks fully overcome their internal compliance barriers and enter the market en masse, Anchorage and BitGo may have already firmly established an unshakable industry leadership position within the U.S. trust bank framework.

Just as safe deposit companies evolved into today’s giant commercial banks, these two institutions are using trust services as a springboard to become new global banks of the digital age.

Diagram: Agora and Catena leverage a trust structure to expand across investment advisory and direct asset management.

State Street has extended its expertise in fund asset custody to asset management, ultimately building a global ETF behemoth; now, Agora and Catena are attempting to replicate this legendary path in the digital assets space.

On September 18, 2026, both Agora and Catena received conditional preliminary approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a national trust bank.

Currently, the investment advisory and active asset management services offered by the two institutions under their trust bank licenses are in an intensive pre-launch preparation phase, awaiting final approval for full-scale operations.

Upon official approval, Agora plans to provide institutional clients with comprehensive analysis of on-chain investment opportunities and yield generation advice, while retaining final buying and selling decisions in the hands of the clients.

Catena goes further, planning to offer direct asset management services依托 the U.S. trust bank infrastructure. Its asset management scope will not only encompass traditional institutional funds but also proactively take charge of on-chain digital assets allocated and utilized by autonomous AI agents.

Their early market positioning holds extremely critical strategic significance. In the field of digital asset management, deep understanding of the underlying blockchain ecosystem and 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 compositional integration of multiple protocols operates on technical mechanisms fundamentally different from those in traditional financial markets.

If traditional financial institutions fail to establish a comprehensive cryptocurrency risk management framework, this expertise gap will only widen over time.

If Agora and Catena can establish an undisputed on-chain asset management track record before traditional financial institutions do, and subsequently launch low-barrier, compliant products for retail investors, they have a real opportunity to become new on-chain powerhouses rivaling the giants of traditional Wall Street asset management.

Securely holding digital assets has always been the foundation of custodial institutions. However, in the future competitive landscape of the industry, merely safeguarding private keys will become a baseline requirement; the true differentiator will lie in an institution’s ability to build value-added services on top of its custody infrastructure.

As the DeFi and RWA markets continue to converge, institutional clients no longer seek to simply hold tokens in cold wallets; they want to actively deploy their assets for investment, use them as collateral for financing, or enable efficient liquidity flows.

Taking tokenized U.S. Treasury funds as an example, investors today seek more than just basic interest—they aim to use tokenized U.S. Treasuries as collateral to borrow stablecoins and deploy those borrowed stablecoins into other on-chain arbitrage strategies, maximizing leverage and utility across multiple financial channels with a single asset.

For financial institutions, helping clients unlock their existing assets and integrate them into more trading scenarios holds commercial value no less than creating an entirely new product from scratch.

This also opens up limitless possibilities for cryptocurrency custodians. Institutions engaging in digital asset investment and high-frequency trading require, in addition to secure custody, efficient asset transfers, cross-chain settlement, and dynamic collateral management services.

A custodian that has firmly secured control over its clients’ underlying assets and holds a full suite of licenses for clearing, settlement, and collateral management is naturally positioned as an indispensable hub in institutional clients’ overall capital landscapes.

Trust services are the ideal compliant vehicle for meeting these advanced asset management and investment needs. Trust companies are fully capable of executing end-to-end asset allocation and income distribution in accordance with the client’s business intentions and the terms of the trust agreement.

By leveraging U.S. trust banks and associated entities to expand their business boundaries, as previously mentioned leading institutions have done, custodians are fully capable of progressively evolving to offer the full range of integrated financial services that were previously divided among traditional banks, securities firms, and asset management institutions.

Of course, simply obtaining a trust license does not automatically guarantee business success. Custodians must diligently develop financial products that truly meet customer needs and earn market trust through solid investment returns while ensuring absolute asset security.

Custodians that establish a practical moat in on-chain asset management and quantitative trading will gain a significant first-mover asymmetric advantage over slower-moving traditional financial institutions.

A year ago, the entire industry’s spotlight was focused on the unchecked growth of the custodial sector itself; today, the central issue has quietly shifted to what kind of momentum these institutions holding massive assets can unleash next.

Over the next year, it may become a pivotal turning point for forward-thinking institutions that have long prepared their trust services to officially launch and aggressively expand.

If secure custody is merely the admission ticket to the second half of digital finance, then the advanced financial service ecosystem built on trust charter rights will ultimately determine who ascends to the throne as the industry leader of the next era.