Institutional investors are not scared off by crypto-winter, according to State Street.
According to State Street, the current crypto winter hasn’t scared off institutional investors, who are still interested in blockchain and digital assets.
Irfan Ahmad, the Asia Pacific digital lead for the bank’s crypto unit State Street Digital, told the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) on September 11 that the firm’s institutional clients have continued to make moves in the sector even though June and July were very volatile.
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“When things were really picking up in June and July, institutional clients didn’t necessarily double down, but they didn’t let that stop them from making strategic bets on the asset class itself, either.”
Cosmos Asset Management and 21Shares launched three crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on the Cboe Australia exchange in May. Asset manager Monochrome recently got approval to launch the country’s first spot crypto ETF licenced by the Australian financial services industry in August.
State Street is the fund administrator for the Cosmos Purpose Bitcoin Access ETF. Ahmad told the SMH that more crypto products will be released in Australia in the “very near future,” but he didn’t give any specific names.
“Our clients have been talking to us in a more practical way about how they might be able to launch products or how we might be able to help them launch those products in the future,” he said.
While this was going on, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and big Australian banks like ANZ and NAB were mostly focused on stablecoins and tokenizing traditional assets instead of crypto investments.
The Commonwealth Bank had a short-lived service for trading cryptocurrencies, but it was shut down for good in May because of uncertainty about the rules.
Recently, well-known American institutions like BlackRock have been making serious crypto bets overseas. The $10 trillion asset manager teamed up with Coinbase last month to give institutional clients direct access to cryptocurrencies and to launch a private spot Bitcoin (BTC) trust.
In August, the global investment bank Citigroup also hired two key executives, Ryan Rugg and David Cunningham, for its Treasury and Trade Solutions (TTS) unit. This unit is in charge of the bank’s institutional crypto offerings and is led by Rugg and Cunningham.
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Rugg joined TTS as the global head of digital assets, and Cunningham joined the company as the director of digital assets and strategic partner development.
More recently, on September 7, the Swiss digital asset banking platform SEBA Bank launched an institutional Ether (ETH) staking service to meet the growing demand for the asset that pays interest before the Merge.
