Tiger Research Report: The Next Chapter of Crypto, From Custody to Trust Services

Author: Ekko An (Tiger Research)

Compiled by TechFlow

TechFlow Editor's Note:Over the past year, the digital asset custody industry has expanded explosively. As the number of MiCA-licensed custodians in Europe surged fourfold and Wall Street giants such as Standard Chartered and Citi entered the market one after another, the underlying security foundation for on-chain assets has begun to take shape. However, the traditional custody model, which relies solely on collecting basis-point fees based on assets under custody (AUC), is quickly hitting a ceiling for business growth.

To break free from the profit constraints of a single fee rate, leading crypto-native institutions are accelerating their evolution into trust services, which carry fiduciary duties and authority over asset disposition, following the century-long trajectory of traditional finance. History rhymes strikingly: in the 19th century, the Boston Safe Deposit Company grew into a trust bank by moving into estate and bond collateral management, while State Street similarly leveraged its fund custody base to give birth to the world's first ETF and an index asset-management empire.

Today, Anchorage, BitGo, Agora, and Catena have either obtained or applied for national trust bank charters from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), enabling a full stack of stablecoin issuance, large-scale clearing and settlement, investment advisory, and autonomous asset management for AI agents. As secure asset custody becomes merely a ticket to commoditized competition, whoever can use trust charters to build a closed loop of high-value capital services will lead the next golden age of institutional crypto finance.

Key Takeaways

The digital asset custody market grew rapidly over the past year, with the number of compliant custodians under Europe's MiCA framework increasing more than fourfold, from 50 to 230.

Custody businesses primarily charge proportional service fees based on the size of assets held, a model that limits their revenue ceiling; trust services, which grant institutions direct authority to manage and invest those assets, are becoming the core direction of the next phase of evolution.

Throughout the history of traditional finance, safe deposit companies initially expanded from simple secure storage into estate management and bond collateral management, and State Street later moved from fund asset custody to active investment management; this classic evolution is now being fully replayed in the digital asset sector.

Anchorage and BitGo are expanding into stablecoin issuance and clearing and settlement, while Agora and Catena are fully developing investment advisory and asset management businesses. All four institutions have either leveraged or are applying for national trust bank charters to broaden their business boundaries.

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

The Rapid Growth of Crypto Custody Over the Past Year

A year ago, Tiger Research pointed out in its report "The Custody Industry Growth You May Have Overlooked" that custody services are the core foundation of the entire digital asset industry. At the time, however, 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 surged. In Europe, the number of compliant custodians licensed under the EU's comprehensive crypto regulatory framework, MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation), increased more than fourfold, from an initial 50 to 230.

At the same time, major global traditional financial institutions have also made heavy strategic moves: Standard Chartered entered aggressively by acquiring specialist custodians, and Citigroup publicly announced that it will officially launch its own custody business within the year.

This dramatic shift directly reflects the continued expansion of on-chain assets. According to RWA.xyz statistics, the size of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) surged 85% in just one year, rising to approximately $39.8 billion.

The total market capitalization of stablecoins grew by more than 50% in 2025 alone, crossing the $300 billion mark and remaining near that level ever since. Because both tokenized assets and stablecoins require their underlying assets to be held under compliant custody, demand for custody naturally increased.

However, institutions are rushing in not merely to capture a share of basic custody business. Standalone custody revenue mainly comes from proportional fees based on the size of assets under custody, which makes the business ceiling highly limited.

Therefore, forward-looking institutions are using existing custody client relationships as a springboard, accelerating their expansion into trust services to significantly improve profitability.

In the short term, institutions focus on custody to capture surging compliance demand; in the medium to long term, they use it as a foundation to leap into higher-value business areas such as trust services.

Custody and Trust Services: From Asset Safekeeping to Asset Management

Chart: A Comprehensive Comparison of the Core Dimensions of Custody and Trust Services

Custody and trust services are often conflated by outsiders. Although both involve holding client assets, the legal responsibilities and business scope assumed by 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, while the custodian's role is strictly limited to safekeeping and transferring assets upon instruction.

By contrast, under a trust structure, the settlor (client) transfers ownership of the assets to the trustee (trust company), which independently manages, invests, and disposes of the assets in accordance with the specific purpose for which the trust was established.

Any income generated from these assets is allocated in full to the beneficiaries designated by the settlor. A trust company operates much like a trustee managing family wealth: it is responsible for growing assets through investment and distributing income to family members at agreed intervals.

Because trust companies can make independent management and investment decisions regarding the underlying assets, they are legally bound by a fiduciary duty to place beneficiaries' interests first.

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

A Historical Cycle Repeats: From Asset Safekeeping to Trust Services

To date, most digital asset custody services still center primarily on the secure storage of assets. In the industry's early stages, custody demand mainly arose from spot and derivatives 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 can no longer meet the market's urgent demand for deeper trust functions such as yield generation and collateral settlement.

This evolution closely mirrors the development path of traditional financial history. During the American Civil War, the U.S. government began issuing government bonds on a large scale, driving a sharp increase in the number of ordinary individual investors holding securities.

To store these bonds securely, investors began renting safe deposit boxes, fueling the early growth of professional safe deposit companies. However, as client asset sizes and needs became increasingly diversified, physical safekeeping alone soon reached its limits, prompting these companies to expand fully into trust business.

The Evolution of Safe Deposit Companies: From Physical Safekeeping to Estate and Collateral Management

Chart: How Traditional Safe Deposit Companies Expanded Personal and Corporate Client Services Through Trust Functions

Safe deposit companies in Boston and Rochester are classic examples in traditional finance of successfully moving from safekeeping into the trust sector. As clients' wealth pain points extended beyond simple safekeeping, these companies naturally expanded their service offerings.

For individual clients, the core pain point was asset succession. After a client passed away, securities stored in safe deposit boxes often faced lengthy probate disputes or administrative gaps.

To address this issue, safe deposit companies established trust structures to administer the decedent's estate, making periodic income distributions to the surviving spouse for life through investment management, and then transferring the entire principal to the next generation of children after the spouse's death.

For corporate clients, the core pain point was bond collateral management. When companies issued bonds to raise financing, they were required to deposit the corresponding collateral with a neutral third party to protect bondholders' legal rights in the event of default.

In 1883, the Boston Safe Deposit Company formally served as trustee, managing the bond collateral of American Rapid Telegraph. This was also a significant milestone in traditional financial history as safe deposit companies expanded into corporate trust functions.

These historical cases show that safe deposit companies gradually transformed themselves into modern trust banks by adding legal trust functions to their existing safekeeping business.

Because clients already trusted these institutions highly and were willing to entrust them with asset safekeeping, they were naturally more inclined to authorize them to continue managing those assets. This also points the way forward for today's digital asset custodians: addressing clients' unmet deeper financial needs.

State Street's Paradigm: From Fund Asset Safekeeping to Active Asset Management

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

State Street is an industry benchmark for moving from simple fund asset custody to direct active investment management.

By integrating asset custody and asset management, State Street was able to offer clients comprehensive financial services. Institutional clients that had previously entrusted only fund safekeeping began confidently delegating asset management to State Street for professional investment operations.

State Street's initial asset management business also emerged from the core capabilities it accumulated through routine custody operations. Having long been responsible for fund valuation, accounting, and recordkeeping, State Street developed highly precise practical expertise in managing portfolios that track market indices.

Leveraging this advantage, State Street Bank established a dedicated index management division for institutional investors in 1978, officially launching its active asset management business.

Subsequently, State Street Bank continued to broaden the audience for its products. In 1993, State Street and the American Stock Exchange launched the world's first exchange-traded fund tracking the S&P 500 Index, SPY, with State Street serving as trustee.

State Street Bank fully leveraged the deep technical barriers built through routine custody work in trade clearing, interbank settlement, and fund valuation, creating an operational moat that traditional asset management giants find hard to match.

Today's digital asset custodians can follow the same playbook: uncovering the most explosive next-stage asset management closed-loop business model from the on-chain assets they hold and the deeply served client ecosystems.

How digital asset custodians are crossing over into trust services

Current digital asset custody institutions are accelerating beyond simple private-key storage and advancing comprehensively into integrated trust services.

Among them, the most representative pioneers are Anchorage, BitGo, Agora, and Catena. The first two are actively entering stablecoin issuance and clearing and settlement channels, while the latter two are fully focused on investment advisory and active asset management.

More critically, all four institutions have either formally obtained or are actively applying for national trust bank charters issued by the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), using them as a core compliance lever to expand their business footprint.

Anchorage and BitGo: layering bank-grade financial services on a custody foundation

Chart: Bank-grade value-added business matrix expanded by Anchorage and BitGo leveraging national trust bank charters

Historically, safe deposit companies used trust charters to transform from physical custody into trust banks. In today's digital asset space, Anchorage and BitGo are evolving along an almost identical trajectory.

Both institutions have obtained nationwide statutory licenses to provide both trust and custody services: Anchorage took the lead by reorganizing as a national trust bank in January 2021, and BitGo achieved a substantive breakthrough in obtaining a national trust bank charter in December 2025.

With national trust bank compliance credentials, their business matrix has expanded from initial institutional-client Bitcoin and Ethereum products to real-world assets (RWA) and stablecoin ecosystems.

Today, their competitors are no longer limited to other crypto-native custodians. Leveraging trust charters, they can compete directly with traditional Wall Street giants in stablecoin issuance, block trade settlement, staking yield distribution, and on-chain collateralized custody.

With exponential growth in spot Bitcoin ETFs, RWA tokenized assets, and stablecoin scale, institutional clients' demand for large-value secure settlement and on-chain staking yield is also rising geometrically.

The assets under management and compliance reputation accumulated by both institutions are sufficient to intercept potential client flows from traditional commercial banks directly in core digital asset areas. Their biggest moat lies in hundreds of deeply tied top-tier institutional clients and years of accumulated native on-chain settlement and risk management experience.

By the time traditional commercial banks fully clear internal compliance obstacles and formally enter at scale, Anchorage and BitGo may have already firmly established an unshakable industry leadership position under the national trust bank framework.

Just as safe deposit companies eventually transformed into modern commercial banking giants, these two institutions are using trust services as a springboard to gradually grow into new global-scale banks for the digital age.

Agora and Catena: from asset holding to active asset management

Chart: Agora and Catena using trust structures to cross into investment advisory and direct asset management

State Street Bank extended capabilities accumulated in fund asset custody into asset management and ultimately built a global ETF flagship; Agora and Catena are trying to replicate this legendary path in digital assets.

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

Currently, the investment advisory and active asset management businesses that the two institutions intend to operate under trust bank licenses are in intensive preliminary preparation, awaiting final full operating licenses.

Once formally approved, Agora plans to provide institutional clients with comprehensive on-chain investment opportunity analysis and yield-generation advisory, while final buy and sell decision-making authority remains with clients.

Catena goes a step further, planning to conduct direct asset management through a nationwide trust bank structure. Its asset management scope will not only cover traditional institutional funds but also proactively manage on-chain digital assets allocated and used by autonomous AI agents.

Their early positioning carries critical strategic significance. In digital asset management, deep understanding of underlying on-chain ecosystems and battle-tested refinement of quantitative risk-control models often require years of accumulation.

In sophisticated DeFi protocols, capturing excess returns through asset lending, liquidity market making, and modular multi-protocol composition relies on technical mechanics fundamentally different from traditional financial markets.

If traditional financial institutions are slow to establish comprehensive crypto risk management frameworks, this professional knowledge gap will only widen over time.

If Agora and Catena can establish an indisputable on-chain asset management track record ahead of traditional financial institutions and subsequently launch accessible, compliant products for retail investors, they have a strong chance of growing into a new on-chain force comparable to traditional Wall Street asset management giants.

Custody has become the baseline: preparing for the next phase of industry evolution

Securely holding digital assets has always been the foundation of custody institutions. However, in the future industry competitive landscape, merely safeguarding private keys will become an entry threshold, and the true differentiator will be institutions' ability to build value-added services on top of custody infrastructure.

As DeFi and RWA markets continue to converge, institutional clients are no longer content with leaving tokens idle in cold wallets; they want to deploy assets for investment, use them as financing collateral, or transfer them efficiently at any time.

Using tokenized US Treasury funds as an example, investors' expectations today go far beyond earning base interest: they want to use tokenized Treasuries as collateral to borrow stablecoins and deploy those stablecoins into other on-chain arbitrage strategies, maximizing the leverage and utility of a single asset across multiple financial processes.

For financial institutions, helping clients activate existing assets and integrate them into more trading scenarios is commercially as valuable as creating a new product from scratch.

This also opens up vast possibilities for crypto custodians. When institutions engage in digital asset investment and high-frequency trading, they need not only secure custody but also efficient asset transfers, cross-chain settlement, and dynamic collateral management services.

A custodian that already firmly controls clients' underlying assets and holds a full suite of clearing, settlement, and collateral management licenses can naturally play an irreplaceable central role in institutional clients' overall capital landscape.

Trust services are the optimal compliant vehicle for meeting these advanced asset management and investment needs. Trust companies are fully capable of carrying out end-to-end asset allocation and yield distribution in accordance with clients' commercial intent and the terms of trust agreements.

By leveraging nationwide trust banks and affiliated entities to expand business boundaries, as the leading institutions described earlier have demonstrated, custodians can gradually transform and upgrade to provide the comprehensive financial services that were previously fragmented among traditional banks, broker-dealers, and asset managers.

Of course, simply obtaining a trust license does not automatically guarantee commercial success. Custodians must diligently develop financial products that clients truly need and earn market trust with solid investment returns while ensuring absolute asset safety.

Custodians that first establish operational moats in on-chain asset management and quantitative trading will have a significant first-mover asymmetric advantage over slow-moving traditional financial giants.

A year ago, the industry's spotlight was focused entirely on the rapid growth of the custody sector itself; today, the central question has quietly shifted to what potential institutions holding massive assets can unlock next.

The next year could become the critical watershed for pioneering institutions that have long meticulously prepared trust services to officially launch operations and aggressively capture market share.

If secure custody is merely the admission ticket to the second half of digital finance, the closed-loop advanced financial services built on trust charters will ultimately determine who ascends to industry leadership in the next era.

Source: TechFlow