Bitcoin lands on the same custody rails Citi uses for equities and bonds

Citi will begin holding bitcoin for institutional clients later this year. The bank is rolling the cryptocurrency into Custody+, the same platform its Investor Services arm uses for traditional securities, it said Tuesday.

The move matters to asset managers who have wanted a regulated US bank, not a crypto-native company, to custody digital assets.

Citi uses one framework for tokens and traditional securities

Citi is merging digital asset custody into Custody+, a new Investor Services platform focused on markets that trade 24/7 and settle faster than the old T+1 beat. Clients will be able to reach both their traditional holdings and their bitcoin in one place.

Citi said the crypto service is built on a common digital-asset architecture. That same platform already moves tokenized deposits almost instantly, 24 hours a day, in select markets.

Bitcoin is the first token supported. Custody+ also bundles in real-time asset servicing, instant settlement, liquidity tools, and what Citi calls AI-powered market intelligence.

Citi announced native crypto custody in November 2025. The project has been in development for close to three years, Biswarup Chatterjee, the bank’s global head of partnerships and innovation, said in October.

Chatterjee said at the time that Citi wanted to offer “a credible custody solution” for asset managers and institutional clients, with the bank holding native tokens itself rather than routing them through outside exchanges.

Some services would be built in-house, while others might rely on a “third-party, lightweight, nimble solution,” he said. Tuesday’s update connects the offering to Custody+ and a launch window of later this year.

The OCC cleared banks for crypto custody in 2025

The GENIUS Act made it easier for banks to deal with stablecoins and other blockchain assets. In May 2025, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) told institutions they could offer crypto custody.

The SEC repealed Staff Accounting Bulletin 121, the guidance that had made it capital-intensive to hold client crypto, and replaced it with the friendlier SAB 122.

Cryptopolitan previously reported that in September 2025, U.S. Bancorp re-launched its institutional bitcoin custody service with NYDIG as sub-custodian, joining BNY Mellon, Fidelity, Coinbase, and Anchorage Digital.

Deutsche Bank of Germany has said it will launch custody in 2026 with help from Bitpanda. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, on the contrary, said his bank will let clients buy crypto but won’t hold it for them.

In January, Citi worked with Intercontinental Exchange on tokenized deposits across its clearinghouses. In July, the bank joined a Swift pilot testing 24/7 cross-border payments with tokenized deposits.

The bank is also among the US lenders supporting a tokenized deposit network via The Clearing House, which plans to launch in the first half of 2027. Bitcoin was trading at around $64,660 when the news broke.

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