By publishing the world's first comprehensive crypto framework in 2023, the European Union had quite a head start in digital assets regulation. Three years later, the European Commission is now asking whether MiCA is still fit for purpose.
Yesterday, it launched a public consultation that covers a remarkably broad range of topics:
MiCA’s regulatory perimeter, and whether the line between crypto-assets and financial instruments is still clear enough.
Stablecoins, including reserves, redemption rights, global issuance models, and the ban on yield.
CASPs and market access, including reverse solicitation, non-EU platforms, and multi-service business models.
Topics MiCA barely touched the first time: staking, lending, DeFi, tokenized deposits, perpetuals, prediction markets.
The legal foundations of tokenization, from ownership and transfer to custody, collateral, insolvency and conflicts of law.
The bottom line: We’re going for MiCA 2.0.
What’s interesting is the timing. This consultation comes well before the formal MiCA review due in 2027, suggesting the Commission is aware that the market and competitive landscape have moved quickly, not least because of developments in the U.S.
Feedback is due by 31 August.
In today’s Briefing:
Qivalis officially confirms 25 new member banks
Standard Chartered acquires Zodia Custody
HIGH SIGNAL NEWS
Qivalis now officially counts 37 member banks. As revealed by Blockstories two weeks ago, 25 credit institutions, including ABN AMRO, Intesa Sanpaolo, and BPCE, have joined the consortium as it prepares to issue a euro stablecoin in H2 2026. More details on Qivalis' governance and the consortium’s structure can be found in our article. 🇪🇺
The Bank of England softens its guidance on wholesale stablecoins. Unlike its 2023 publication, the supervisor now allows credit institutions to issue stablecoins intended for wholesale use, while those designed for retail customers must still be issued through separate legal entities. The BoE is also working to expand the Digital Securities Sandbox to include stablecoins as settlement assets. 🇬🇧
zerohash obtains MiCA-CASP license. Already holding an EMI license in the Netherlands, the company can now provide regulated crypto-asset and stablecoin infrastructure services across the European Union. Its clients already include institutions such as BNY Mellon, Franklin Templeton, and Morgan Stanley. 🇳🇱
Seturion welcomes new strategic partners. flatexDEGIRO, one of Europe’s fastest-growing online brokers, will connect its retail flow for tokenized securities to the European settlement platform. Société Générale aims to issue tokenized products, while SG-FORGE will provide its EUR and USD stablecoins for settlement. 🤝
TOP STORY
Standard Chartered Acquires Zodia Custody to Bring Digital Asset Custody Fully In-House
Bank-owned custody: On Monday, Standard Chartered announced it will acquire Zodia Custody, the regulated digital asset custodian it had incubated since 2020 through its venture arm, SC Ventures. The custody business will be folded into the bank’s Financing and Securities Services division.
Why it matters: Digital asset custody is moving from the edge of banking into its core, with competition no longer confined to crypto-native firms like Coinbase, Ripple Custody, and BitGo. Standard Chartered is now putting itself at the center of that shift by strengthening its digital assets custody offering for its institutional clients, while other G-SIBs like Citigroup and Deutsche Bank are reportedly also building out their own.
A maturing custody market: This wave of bank entries reflects how the demands of institutional clients have shifted. Cold storage is no longer the defining feature of digital asset custody. Instead, clients increasingly look for prime-services capabilities like lending, brokerage, collateralized financing, and off-exchange settlement, which players across the custody market are already racing to layer on top.
Already at the front: Standard Chartered enters this race from a strong starting position. In July 2025, it became the first G-SIB to launch institutional crypto spot trading, and the bank also operates a regulated HKD stablecoin initiative in Hong Kong and has developed tokenized deposit capabilities.
A six-year incubation: That position has been building since 2020, when SC Ventures set up Zodia Custody. Over the years that followed, Zodia built a client base that includes 21Shares and CoinShares and obtained regulatory status across five jurisdictions. Standard Chartered itself became the largest user of the platform, running its live digital asset custody business on Zodia's infrastructure across multiple markets.
What the acquisition enables: Bringing Zodia fully inside now consolidates that arrangement under the bank's direct ownership and significantly expands its existing digital asset custody offering both geographically and in product scope.
“The acquisition allows Standard Chartered to expand the reach of its existing digital asset custody offering, both geographically and in terms of product capabilities. It opens up additional markets such as the UK, Australia, and ADGM, while also broadening what the bank can offer clients, from staking to collateral management and off-exchange settlement,” Anoosh Arevshatian, Chief Product Officer at Zodia Custody, told Blockstories.
Solutions stays separate: What Standard Chartered is not absorbing is Zodia's other business line, a white-label infrastructure platform that lets institutions build and operate their own digital asset services. It will be carved out into a new SC Ventures entity called Zodia Solutions, led by current Zodia Custody CEO Julian Sawyer. The structure keeps the regulated custody client business inside Standard Chartered, while making the underlying tech stack available to other financial institutions that want to launch digital asset services without assembling the full stack themselves.
“Zodia Solutions is designed to expand access to bank-grade digital asset infrastructure for financial institutions. Custody, settlement through Interchange, staking, tokenization, and liquidity access are all available through a single integration, allowing institutions to scale digital asset services without having to assemble the entire stack internally,” Arevshatian added.
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Three Views From Inside Other Institutions
Standard Chartered's path of bringing a digital asset custodian fully in-house is one of several structural choices banks are making.
To put the move in context, Blockstories asked three practitioners at other regulated banks how they have approached the three core questions: what to build versus buy, how to integrate it into existing banking infrastructure, and how to design it for more than one bank.
Dr. Miguel Vaz is Managing Director of Hauck Aufhäuser Digital Custody GmbH, a BaFin-licensed crypto custodian within Hauck Aufhäuser Lampe Privatbank AG, part of the ABN AMRO Group.
For digital assets custody: how does a bank decide what to build itself and what to get from providers?
In crypto custody, people often think first about private keys. But signing a transaction is only the common technical core. The real complexity lies in the processes around it: the controls, AML checks, travel rule compliance, wallet architecture, entitlement frameworks, and integration with the bank’s internal systems.
That is where the bank has to take ownership. The bank knows its customers, what they want to do with their assets, and what the regulatory framework requires. A customer may want to transfer assets, stake, settle, or interact with digital securities. The bank’s role is to design the processes that allow those interactions to happen safely.
The cryptography itself is a different discipline. How a private key is stored, how a transaction is signed, and how the system keeps up with new blockchains, signature schemes, and exploits is specialist infrastructure work. That is why banks often rely on technology providers for that layer instead of building it from scratch.
So the split is relatively clear: the bank should own the custody product and the customer-facing process layer; providers should deliver the technical components that support secure signing and key management.
Laurin Krämer oversees institutional custody and staking infrastructure at Bank Frick, a Liechtenstein-based credit institution that was among the first in Europe to launch a regulated crypto offering.
Once a bank has chosen its custody stack, what does it take to make it work inside existing banking infrastructure?
The main challenge is that most custody providers do not connect directly to a bank’s core banking system. Banks therefore often need to build a middleware layer that maps clients to wallets, links omnibus and segregated wallet setups to core banking accounts, and handles internal banking logic that the custody provider does not cover. This is where much of the bank-specific complexity sits.
A second friction point is that traditional core banking systems were not designed around blockchain wallets. They do not natively understand what a wallet is, so every digital asset process has to be translated back into core banking logic. That makes integration highly customized, especially when the underlying infrastructure is old.
Still, there is no way around it. Even in an increasingly tokenized world, the core banking system remains the source of truth today, not the onchain environment. Every onchain activity has to be reflected in the core banking system, because this is where client information, reporting, and client interaction are anchored.
Andreas Sack is Head of Digital Assets Infrastructure at DekaBank, the securities house of Germany’s largest savings bank network, the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, which brings together more than 350 local savings banks and serves around 50 million customers.
And when custody has to serve a network of banks, what does the design have to look like?
The Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe brings together a wide range of entities, client segments, use cases, and asset types, each with different levels of maturity and operational needs. At that scale, custody infrastructure cannot be built as a rigid, single-provider setup. The architecture needs to remain modular and adaptable, which is also why traditional white-label custody solutions are often not sufficient.
The first reason is operational resilience. We deliberately mitigate concentration risk and avoid provider lock-in — particularly in a market where custody vendors may be acquired, pivot strategically, or discontinue service for specific client segments. Accordingly, we have architected for multi-provider and backup capability, preserving the ability to switch or complement providers as circumstances evolve.
A second imperative is asset-specific integration. Whether it’s integrating a new blockchain, or adding new assets, we remain adaptable, while also taking into account the requirements of traditional legacy banking systems.
Apex Group: Digital Asset Servicing Specialist, Malta 🇲🇹
Deutsche Börse Group: Product Manager - Digital Assets / Collateral Coin, Luxembourg 🇱🇺
DTCC: Principal Solutions Architect (Blockchain & Web3), London 🇬🇧
ECB: Market Infrastructure Experts - Digital Euro Project, Frankfurt 🇩🇪
IBM: Senior Digital Asset Technical Seller, Switzerland 🇨🇭
Rothschild & Co: VC Principal - Digital Asset Investing, Paris 🇫🇷
State Street: Digital Assets Operations Director, Poland 🇵🇱
Swift: Digital Assets Payments Product Manager, London 🇬🇧
We just published a new research report on Spain’s digital asset ecosystem. In there, we identify the five characteristics defining Spain’s digital asset adoption, provide a snapshot of where the market stands today, and outline where it is likely headed next.
The print version will be presented today at our Madrid Summit. So, if you're in town, make sure to stop by.
AI and Tokenization are poised to redefine the Efficient Frontier (Franklin Templeton) — Franklin Templeton's digital assets team argues that the combination of AI and tokenization could deliver a lasting improvement in portfolio efficiency, pointing to always-on investment processes, broader access to tokenized opportunity sets, and lower operational and settlement frictions as the main drivers.
The Future of Digital Assets (BCG) — This report sizes the three core digital asset domains, (crypto assets, stablecoins, and RWAs) and outlines four scenarios for where banks face the greatest revenue risks and where the largest opportunities may emerge across asset management, trading, and the client interface.
→ Want more? Visit the Blockstories Library for a curated selection of 120+ reports on digital assets.
What do you think of today's briefing?
Disclaimer: The information provided in the Institutional Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.