Blockchain.com secured a definitive Virtual Asset Service Provider custody license from the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority on July 22, 2026, satisfying the final conditions on an approval the regulator had granted the company on a conditional basis.
Key Takeaways
- Blockchain.com holds a full VASP custody license from the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority through its Cayman Islands subsidiary.
- CIMA also approved the company to exchange virtual assets for fiat currencies and to exchange convertible virtual assets for one another.
- The license supports institutional custody, institutional staking and retail staking from the Cayman entity.
- Blockchain.com reports more than $1.1 trillion in crypto transactions and 43 million verified users since 2011.
- Blockchain.com Group Holdings has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC.
What Happened?
Blockchain.com’s Cayman Islands subsidiary now holds a definitive VASP license from CIMA, the territory’s financial services and banking regulator. The authorization covers virtual asset custody and two exchange permissions: trading between virtual assets and fiat currencies, and trading between convertible virtual assets.
The license supports three product lines from the Cayman entity. Institutional custody covers storage for organizations managing digital assets. Institutional staking lets those organizations join network consensus and earn yield, and retail staking extends the same function to individual users inside a regulated perimeter.
Lane Kasselman, Co-CEO of Blockchain.com, tied the approval to earlier clearances. “Our VASP custody services licence builds on the regulatory momentum we’ve established with our recent MiCA and FCA approvals,” he said in the company’s announcement.
JUST IN: 🏛 https://t.co/6VcNNUSRiT has secured a VASP custody license from the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, marking a significant regulatory milestone for the exchange and custodian. pic.twitter.com/OaVcDzjgx0
— BTC Live (@btcliveco) August 6, 2026
The Cayman file took four years to close
Blockchain.com has operated in the territory under a VASP registration since May 2022. CIMA granted conditional approval of the licensing application in December 2025, and the company cleared the outstanding conditions before the grant took effect. The operation moves from a registration carrying conditions to a standing license.
The company release does not specify which conditions CIMA attached or what clearing them involved. That gap matters for firms reading the timeline as a benchmark for their own filings, because the elapsed time is public while the workload behind it stays private.
Three approvals and an S-1 on file
The Cayman license is the third regulatory clearance Blockchain.com has announced in twelve months, after its MiCA license in Europe and its FCA registration in the UK. The three together cover the European Union, the UK and a Caribbean financial center that institutional funds already use for fund domicile. CoinLaw’s MiCA compliance requirements data shows how much that European authorization now costs mid-size firms.
The approval also lands alongside a corporate event the company has not tied to it. Parent company Blockchain.com Group Holdings has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, the step that precedes a possible US public listing. A licensed custody entity in a recognized hub is the kind of asset an S-1 reviewer examines, and a confidential draft commits the company to no listing date.
Blockchain.com puts its own scale at more than $1.1 trillion in crypto transactions, 43 million verified users and over 94 million wallets since 2011, spread across more than 70 jurisdictions. Those totals are self-reported and do not appear in a public audited filing. Institutional demand for the new permissions is a separate question, and deposit flows into the entity are not disclosed.
The company partnered with TechCayman ahead of the license grant and says its first on-island hire will follow. TechCayman provides the sponsorship framework, operational support and local network for technology companies setting up a physical presence in the territory. Rival custodians widened their own regulated coverage over the same period, including Clearstream’s crypto custody expansion to six additional assets.
Clients who already hold assets with Blockchain.com can check which legal entity their account sits under, because the new permissions attach to the Cayman subsidiary rather than the group as a whole, and confirm which entity offers them staking. The announcement leaves four questions open:
- Which conditions CIMA attached to the December approval, and what satisfying them required?
- How large the Cayman operation will grow beyond the first on-island hire?
- Whether existing institutional clients move their holdings to the licensed Cayman entity?
- When the S-1 becomes public, and what terms the company will seek?
CoinLaw’s Takeaway
The license closes the gap between where Blockchain.com is registered and what it can legally hold for clients in the territory. A supervised custody permission is the precondition for institutional mandates that require a licensed custodian, which a registration alone does not satisfy. The exchange permissions add a second function, letting the same entity move client balances between crypto and fiat without routing through an outside licensed venue.
Kasselman’s framing puts the three approvals on one track, and the sequence supports that reading. Each jurisdiction the company has cleared in the past year treats custody as a licensed activity with capital, reporting and safekeeping duties attached, so the compliance work compounds across filings. The self-reported scale figures explain the appetite for that overhead, since a platform carrying tens of millions of verified users has far more exposure from an unlicensed footprint than a small startup does.
