BNY said Tuesday it plans to add crypto staking to its digital asset custody platform through a partnership with Galaxy (GLXY), pending regulatory approval.
Key Takeaways
- BNY will add crypto staking to its Digital Asset Custody platform through a partnership with Galaxy, subject to regulatory approval.
- Galaxy will supply the staking infrastructure and act as a design partner on BNY’s wider digital asset platform.
- Institutional clients will stake assets without moving them out of BNY’s custody, removing a step from the current process.
- BNY oversees $62.6 trillion in assets under custody and administration, based on figures reported as of June 30, 2026.
- The deal follows BNY’s July 29 move to shift transfer agency recordkeeping for an $8.6 trillion market onto blockchain rails.
What Happened?
BNY and Galaxy announced a strategic collaboration Tuesday to add staking to BNY’s Digital Asset Custody platform, according to a joint statement. The service, still subject to regulatory review, will let institutional clients earn staking rewards on digital assets they already hold at BNY without transferring the tokens to a separate provider.
Galaxy will provide the underlying staking infrastructure and act as a design partner as BNY builds out its broader digital asset platform, the companies said.
Carolyn Weinberg, Chief Product and Innovation Officer at BNY said:
Steve Kurz, Global Co-Head of Digital Assets at Galaxy, framed the tie-up as part of a broader shift in market infrastructure. Kurz said:
How Institutional Staking Will Work?
Staking lets holders of proof-of-stake assets lock up tokens to help secure a blockchain network in exchange for rewards, a mechanism now central to the broader proof-of-stake economy. Ethereum alone has 13.4 million ETH staked, roughly 29% of its total supply, and liquid staking platforms already hold more than $25 billion in total value locked. Folding that yield into a custody account removes the operational and counterparty risk institutions take on when they move assets to an outside staking provider.
Galaxy is already an early client of BNY’s Digital Asset Custody platform, a dual role that puts the firm on both sides of the new arrangement, as infrastructure builder and platform user. BNY launched crypto custody services in 2022 and has since expanded to hold tens of trillions of dollars in assets across its wider custody business, a scale few crypto-native custodians can match.
The companies have not disclosed which proof-of-stake assets will be eligible for staking, the fee structure, or a target launch date once regulators sign off. Institutional clients already holding assets in BNY’s custody should treat the service as pending, not live, until that approval clears.
BNY’s Expanding Blockchain Ambitions
The staking plan extends a run of blockchain announcements from BNY this year. The bank said July 29 it was shifting its core transfer agency recordkeeping onto blockchain technology, creating a single onchain ownership ledger for the $8.6 trillion transfer agency market. It also plans to introduce around-the-clock settlement for traditional and tokenized U.S. Treasuries in 2027 and begin testing tokenized Treasuries on a private blockchain before the end of this year.
BNY’s custody arm already handles a comparable role elsewhere in crypto markets. The bank serves as custodian for the U.S. dollar reserves backing Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin, a mandate it took on in 2025. The staking addition builds on that same custody relationship rather than starting a new business line from scratch.
Industry Landscape: Banks Chase Custody-Plus-Staking
BNY is not the only custodian bundling staking into a broader institutional offering.
- Standard Chartered and Coinbase expanded a partnership combining custody, staking, lending and prime brokerage for institutional clients.
- Anchorage Digital already runs a wrapped-staking arrangement with Lido for institutional ether holders.
- Morgan Stanley routes its crypto ETF exposure through Coinbase’s custody arm rather than building custody in-house.
CoinLaw’s Takeaway
The partnership closes a gap that has kept some institutions on the sidelines of staking. Clients who wanted staking rewards on assets already held by BNY previously had to move tokens to a separate provider, taking on counterparty and operational risk during the transfer. Folding staking into the same custody wrapper Galaxy already uses removes that step and keeps the assets under BNY’s existing governance and audit controls.
The arrangement also shows how proof-of-stake economics now shape custody competition. With staking already representing a meaningful share of major proof-of-stake networks, a custodian that cannot offer it risks losing assets to rivals that can capture that yield in-house. BNY’s move puts it alongside Standard Chartered, Anchorage Digital and other custodians already selling staking as part of a bundled institutional offering, competing less on custody fees alone and more on the breadth of services wrapped around the base product.
