Institutional Custody Models Hold More Than 30% of Digital Assets Outside Centralized Exchanges

Ripple published an Oct. 21 summary of research it commissioned from Boston Consulting Group, framing institutional custody as infrastructure for managing digital assets and connecting them with financial systems.

Institutional custody models now hold more than 30% of digital assets, excluding holdings on centralized exchanges. Institutions weigh governance and policy controls, connections across networks and integration with existing financial systems when choosing custody providers. Approval controls are also gaining importance as bots and AI become more active.

The approaches include Wallet-as-a-Service, which is gaining traction among fintechs focused on retail customers and payments, and self-custody technology that large banks are increasingly licensing. Another model coordinates multiple custodians through a shared orchestration layer.

Custody can support tokenization, stablecoin issuance, payments, treasury, lending and collateral management.