Dutch Banking Giant ING Is Working on A Digital Asset Custody Solution

On Thursday, December 12, Reuters reported that Dutch banking multi-national ING is currently developing a technology for the custody of digital assets. In the last one year, the global banking space has shown much interest in crypto assets and this is yet another testament to it.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, the news agency reported that this initiative aims to provide secure storage facilities to the banks’ customers. Although in the very native stage of development, a team based in Amsterdam is currently working on it.

In a word with the publication, ING said it “sees increasing opportunities with regard to digital assets on both asset backed and native security tokens,” and is taking a particular approach to develop the blockchain technology and open up the sector to its clients.

Apart from this ING has already been working on other blockchain initiatives since last many years. To provide additional data privacy on public distributed ledgers, ING developed a system back in November 2017 which can make blockchain transactions more secure.

Earlier this year in April 2019, ING was also working on another privacy tech called “Bulletproofs”. The bulletproofs would serve as hiding the amount in Bitcoin transactions thereby preventing the risks of external attacks and threats.

On the other hand, ING is reportedly working on blockchain-based trade finance as part of R3 consortium’s Macro Polo project and another in partnership with a Dutch bank dubbed ABN Amro. Earlier this year in January 2019, ING signed a five-year-deal with R3 for using its Corda Enterprise blockchain platform.

ING is not the first global bank to venture in offering custody solutions for digital assets. Last year in 2018, Japanese bank Nomura unveiled its new venture dubbed Komainu to offer custodial solutions to institutional investors.

Also in October 2018, Boston-based financial services giant Fidelity unveiled its services for crypto trading and custodial solutions specifically aimed at institutional investors.

Banking giants like JP Morgan are also working on their digital currency project for instant cross-border settlement of their client funds. In such a case, custodial solutions can be a great use for them.