Institutional crypto custodians: a provider comparison

Coinbase Custody is the dominant custodian for the Bitcoin held by US spot ETFs: it backs the vast majority of products on the market, including BlackRock's IBIT. It operates as a New York trust under NYDFS supervision and holds conditional OCC approval for a national trust-bank charter.

Fidelity Digital Assets is the crypto custody arm of Fidelity Investments. It custodies its own ETF (FBTC) without relying on Coinbase, removing a point of concentration risk unlike almost all of its competitors. It operates under a New York Trust Charter from the NYDFS.

Gemini Trust Company is the custodian of HODL (VanEck), one of the few spot ETFs that don't use Coinbase. It operates as a New York trust under the NYDFS, one of the strictest regulators in the US, giving it a strong compliance reputation.

BitGo Trust Company is the custodian of DEFI (Hashdex), the only spot ETF on the market that uses neither Coinbase nor a New York entity. Chartered as a trust in South Dakota and supervised by the South Dakota Division of Banking, it is a qualified custodian under SEC Rule 206(4)-2 and a pioneer in multisig and MPC.

Anchorage Digital is the first US federally chartered digital-asset bank, granted by the OCC. While it does not appear as the primary custodian of any ETF in our data, BlackRock added it to IBIT as an additional custodian alongside Coinbase, diversifying the custody risk of the world's largest ETF.

Fireblocks is not a pure fiduciary custodian but the MPC infrastructure on which many institutions build their own custody. Its multi-party computation (MPC) technology has become a de facto standard for moving and securing digital assets at institutional scale.

Copper offers institutional custody and settlement with a strong presence in Europe and Asia. Its MPC technology and off-exchange settlement network (ClearLoop) let institutions trade across venues without exposing their assets to the trading platforms.