Zodia Custody

Zodia Custody

Zodia Custody was formed to give regulated financial institutions a compliant gateway to digital assets, built on the balance-sheet backing and governance expectations of its five bank shareholders. It is not a standalone fintech; it is a bank-incubated infrastructure provider that holds registrations with the UK Financial Conduct Authority, the Luxembourg CSSF, the Hong Kong Companies Registry, and Abu Dhabi's ADGM Financial Services Regulatory Authority. CEO Julian Sawyer, previously at Starling Bank and other fintech ventures, was brought in to scale the platform across jurisdictions. The core product is institutional cold-storage custody, supported by Interchange — a settlement network that allows clients to trade from cold storage off-venue with counterparties including LMAX Digital and BitMEX. Zodia also offers a white-label solution, Zodia Solutions, so that financial institutions can embed custody into their own customer offerings without building in-house infrastructure. The firm does not disclose AUM, but its case-study roster shows active mandates with crypto ETP issuers 21Shares, Bitwise, and Invesco, as well as with hedge-fund allocators like Algoz and Forteus. It supports over 80% of the crypto market cap and handles 24/7 instant settlements. Zodia Custody employs roughly 150 people across offices in London, Dublin, Luxembourg, Abu Dhabi, Sydney, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and services clients in more than 15 jurisdictions. Its backing consortium gives it a governance structure uncommon among crypto-native custodians: Standard Chartered, Northern Trust, National Australia Bank, SBI Group, and Emirates NBD each hold strategic stakes, creating an embedded distribution channel into traditional banking clients. In a sign of reorganisation, Standard Chartered announced a non-binding offer in 2024 to acquire the custody business, spinning the technology platform into the standalone Zodia Solutions unit. The firm's structural differentiator is its hybrid model: a regulated custodian that also operates a trading-settlement network and a bank-grade infrastructure-as-a-service business. That combination allows it to sit inside the existing compliance architecture of global banks rather than asking them to adapt to a crypto-native workflow. The unfolding Standard Chartered acquisition will test whether custody alone is a sustainable standalone business or whether the infrastructure layer is the longer-term value driver.