BNY Mellon has launched its digital asset custody platform for some US clients, initially supporting bitcoin and ether. It is an important milestone because BNY Mellon is the world’s largest conventional custodian, with $43 trillion in assets under custody and administration.

“Touching more than 20% of the world’s investable assets, BNY Mellon has the scale to reinvent financial markets through blockchain technology and digital assets,” said Robin Vince, CEO and Chairman of BNY Mellon. “We are excited to help drive the financial industry forward as we begin the next chapter in our innovation journey.”

Last year, the bank revealed the creation of a digital assets unit and then selected Fireblocks as a technology provider in March along with a strategic investment. Its new solution also includes technology from blockchain intelligence and risk management firm Chainalysis in which it also invested.

Other crypto investments have included investment manager Valkyrie, trading infrastructure firm Talos, and analytics firm Coin Metrics. It is also involved in numerous permissioned blockchain projects.

In March, BNY Mellon announced plans to be the primary custodian of the USDC stablecoin.

BNY Mellon also released a survey of institutional digital assets. It found that 97% agree that “tokenization will revolutionize asset management” and 91% want to invest in tokenized products.

However, at this time most do not yet own digital assets in the company’s portfolio. And those that do have little exposure described as ‘exploratory’ levels.

Unlike many other surveys, BNY Mellon’s definition of institutions is more conventional and excludes crypto specialists. Although custodial banks are latecomers, more than a third of institutions use them instead of newcomers. 63% want to exchange tokenized assets with traditional institutions (TradFi).

A significant proportion of asset managers are taking a short-term pause to reassess after the crypto crash. But most of them still hope to move forward soon.

Meanwhile, today SIX Digital Exchange also announced that it had gone live with its crypto custody offering.