State Street and crypto custody from 2026: The giants are coming

By Daniele Corno

Wall Street and crypto have never been so close: State Street ready to offer crypto custody services by 2026

Custody services for a new Big Player

The Wall Street giant “State Street” plans to offer custody services for Bitcoin and crypto-assets by 2024.

A change that now, more than ever, brings the big US banks closer to the crypto sector, in one of the most important transition periods for the entire sector.

This change was made possible after the SEC canceled the SAB 121 (Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 121) regulation. This regulation required banks to consider crypto-assets as liabilities in their financial statements, forcing them to include a dollar value equal to the amount of crypto-assets held in their balance sheets.

Banks such as Jp Morgan and State Street (BNY Mellon was excluded) had to give up custody services as they were extremely expensive, as they could not compete with exchange platforms such as Coinbase and Binance which were exempt from this regulation.

Now, according to the first information shared by TheInformation, the bank would like to offer custody services for crypto-assets and tokenized assets (RWA). A real change of narrative, expected by 2026.

State Street's numbers

Among the largest global institutions, State Street is one of the largest global money managers.

According to the Financial Times in January 2025, the bank, through its subsidiary State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), manages AUM (Assets under management) equal to $4,700 billion dollars and is ranked fourth globally.

It is preceded only by BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity, with respective AUM of $11,600, $8,600 and $4,900 billion dollars.

The picture changes, however, when considering the value of AUC/A (Asset Under Custody/Administration), i.e. the amount of money in custody.

In fact, State Street holds the second position in the market, preceded by BNY Mellon and ahead of JP Morgan, with an AUC/A value of $46,800 billion dollars. The first and third positions are worth $52,100 and $32,000 billion respectively.