World's largest custody bank BNY ($59T AUM) partners with Finstreet and ADI Foundation to offer Bitcoin and Ethereum custody in Abu Dhabi, with stablecoins next.
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BNY, the world's largest custody bank with $59 trillion in assets under management, is now offering Bitcoin and Ethereum custody in Abu Dhabi through partnerships with Finstreet and the ADI Foundation. The move is a deliberate expansion outside the U.S. regulatory environment, targeting the Gulf region's growing appetite for institutional digital asset exposure.
The deal is not a pilot. BNY is launching BTC and ETH custody services directly in the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), the emirate's international financial center. Finstreet, a regulated digital asset firm, provides the local operational layer. ADI Foundation – a separate entity from the semiconductor company – supplies the technical infrastructure for tokenised asset support that will follow.
Custody banks do not lightly enter new jurisdictions. BNY's choice of Abu Dhabi signals that the UAE's regulatory framework – specifically the Financial Services Regulatory Authority within ADGM – offers the clarity BNY needs for institutional-grade crypto safekeeping. The bank already runs a digital custody unit in the U.S. The Abu Dhabi expansion adds a legal and operational hedge against shifting U.S. regulatory winds. The ADGM has courted crypto firms since 2018, issuing clear custody, exchange, and staking rules. For BNY, this means lower legal ambiguity than in the U.S., where the SEC's stance on broker-dealer custody remains unresolved.
Finstreet is the on-the-ground partner. The firm holds an ADGM license and handles the wallet infrastructure, transaction monitoring, and compliance screening. BNY retains the asset servicing and reporting layer. This split structure is common in institutional crypto custody: the bank controls the balance sheet and client relationship; the local partner manages the network-specific risk. The ADI Foundation adds the tokenisation layer, which will become relevant when BNY moves beyond BTC and ETH into stablecoins and tokenised assets.
The read-through for the broader custody sector is straightforward. BNY's move pressures other global custody banks to either secure similar offshore licenses or risk losing Middle Eastern sovereign wealth and pension fund mandates. Abu Dhabi is not a random location. The ADGM's regulatory clarity is a draw. Other custody banks will likely evaluate ADGM or Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority as alternatives. The key metric for institutional crypto custody is not which chain a bank supports but how many regulatory licences it holds. BNY now has two: New York and Abu Dhabi. That number matters more than any single custody pipeline.
pipeline.
BNY has stated that stablecoins and tokenised assets are the next step in the Abu Dhabi partnership. That is the more important signal for the sector. Tokenised money market funds and fixed-income instruments are the use case institutional clients actually want, not raw Bitcoin custody. BNY's ability to settle tokenised assets within ADGM's legal framework could set a template for other banks. The risk is execution speed. BNY's U.S. digital custody unit took over two years to reach production. The Abu Dhabi operation will face similar integration timelines with Finstreet's systems. If BNY moves faster abroad than at home, expect other global custodians to follow the Abu Dhabi playbook – and that would accelerate the shift of institutional crypto activity toward Gulf hubs.
The next decision point for BNY is the stablecoin rollout timeline. If the bank publishes a tokenised fund vehicle within six months, the Abu Dhabi hub moves from experimental to operational. If it stalls, the advantage over competitors shrinks.
For further reading: the broader institutional migration is covered in AlphaScala's crypto market analysis. The regulatory backdrop is unpacked in Why the Senate CLARITY Act Faces a Hard August Deadline. The current market structure is detailed in BTC Dominance 58.3%: Weekend Gains Fail to Trigger Rotation.
Prepared with AlphaScala research tooling and grounded in primary market data: live prices, fundamentals, SEC filings, hedge-fund holdings, and insider activity. Each story is checked against AlphaScala publishing rules before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.