As of a week ago, Zodia Custody has expanded its custody services to 38 coins and tokens. Photo: Shutterstock

As of a week ago, Zodia Custody has expanded its custody services to 38 coins and tokens. Photo: Shutterstock

Zodia Custody’s little sister, Zodia Custody (Ireland), has become the tenth company to be supervised by the CSSF (for anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing) in its capacity as a virtual asset service provider.

Where to start? Not even three years after its launch, the Zodia Custody “rocket” is ready for take-off and is making a number of announcements.

The latest: the fintech, which was born in London and has a subsidiary in Dublin, Zodia Custody (Ireland), has become the tenth virtual asset service provider (VASP) to be supervised by the Commission de surveillance du secteur financier (CSSF, Luxembourg’s financial regulator), which says each time that it is only interested in checking that everything is in place to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. The joint venture created by SC Ventures, the innovation and venture capital unit of Standard Chartered, and Northern Trust in 2020, is therefore licensed by the UK regulator (FCA) and is also supervised by the Irish regulator, as in Luxembourg.

In early January, the institutional cryptocurrency depository recruited a new CEO: Julian Sawyer, who co-founded neobank Starling Bank in 2015 and ran it for four years before joining Bitstamp, left 18 months later over differing views on crypto exchange development with the rest of the board.

Interchange, to separate assets

Zodia Custody offers its custody services for 38 coins and tokens (avalanche, bitcoin, bitcoin cash, cardano, ether, litecoin, polkadot, polygon, Solana and 29 other ERC20-based tokens). Most importantly, the company cryptographically embeds the identity of an owner of a wallet’s private key, ensuring that a third party can validate the key. It allows each account to be independently validated and quickly linked to its owner, for example, in the event of an audit or even a custodian’s bankruptcy.

At the end of the year, Zodia Custody launched “Interchange,” which allows the segregation of client assets to avoid them being swallowed up in the bankruptcy of an exchange. Custody and disclosure practices regarding the safekeeping of customers’ virtual assets, particularly in the event of insolvency or similar proceedings, is a key focus of regulators around the world.

This story was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.