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The world's largest custodian bank will let institutional clients stake digital assets without moving them outside BNY's custody, pending regulatory review
BNY said Tuesday it will add staking to its Digital Asset Custody platform through a partnership with Galaxy, letting institutional clients earn staking rewards on proof-of-stake assets without having to move those assets to a separate provider.
Under the arrangement, Galaxy supplies the staking infrastructure while also serving as a design partner on the continued build-out of BNY's digital asset platform. Eligible clients will be able to access staking alongside BNY's existing custody, fund accounting, tax reporting, payments, and client reporting services within a single workflow, once the offering clears regulatory review. As of June 30, BNY oversaw $62.6 trillion in assets under custody and administration and $2.2 trillion in assets under management, making it the largest custodian bank globally.
Carolyn Weinberg, BNY's chief product and innovation officer, framed the move as a response to clients wanting more than safekeeping alone. Galaxy, which is already a client of BNY's Digital Asset Custody platform, brings staking experience built across proof-of-stake networks along with the broader crypto trading, advisory, and asset management business it has developed since its FTX-era bankruptcy asset sales.
Solving a real operational headache
The problem BNY is targeting is a familiar one for institutional allocators: staking has historically required moving assets out of a regulated custodian and into a specialist staking provider, adding a layer of counterparty risk and operational complexity that many mandates simply won't tolerate. Folding staking directly into custody removes that step entirely.
It's also the latest sign of how central Galaxy has become to institutional staking infrastructure generally. Blockhead reported last October that Galaxy closed its best quarter yet with $505 million in net income, including a staking-business integration with one of the world's largest digital asset custodians that pushed assets under stake toward $7 billion. That custodial list already included Fireblocks, Zodia Custody, and BitGo before this week. BNY is now the largest name on it by a wide margin.
Where this fits
The move continues a pattern Blockhead has tracked across custody this year: incumbents adding crypto-native capabilities rather than building them from scratch. BNY itself expanded into stablecoins in June, making USDC the first stablecoin supported on its Digital Asset Custody platform through a deepened relationship with Circle. Rival custodians have moved in parallel — Citi has said it's targeting a 2026 launch for its own crypto custody service, and ICE put out a white paper this week pitching its ICE Digital Trust subsidiary to crypto ETF issuers.
For a custody market that Bernstein estimates will grow from roughly $3.7 billion to $7.7 billion by 2032, the question is no longer whether the world's largest custodians build digital asset capabilities — it's how many separate services (custody, staking, stablecoin settlement, fund administration) end up bundled into one platform, and who controls that bundle.
