BitGo Secures Expanded Partnership with 21Shares for Regulated Custody and Staking Services in US and European Markets
The enhanced collaboration bolsters institutional infrastructure supporting 21Shares' multibillion-dollar digital asset investment offerings and expands its regulated staking service capabilities.
On Thursday, BitGo Holdings and 21Shares announced an expansion of their current partnership, broadening their collaboration to encompass custody and staking solutions that will support 21Shares' cryptocurrency exchange-traded products (ETPs) available to investors throughout the United States and European regions.
The expanded agreement stipulates that BitGo will furnish qualified custody services, trading and execution capabilities, along with integrated staking infrastructure for both 21Shares' US-based exchange-traded funds and its globally available ETPs. The partnership arrangement additionally grants 21Shares access to liquidity spanning both electronic trading platforms and over-the-counter markets, as detailed in the public announcement.
According to BitGo, these services will be executed through its regulated subsidiary entities operating in the United States and Europe, which include its federally chartered trust banking institution that has received approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), as well as its MiCA-licensed operational entities that have been authorized by Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority.
As a subsidiary of FalconX, 21Shares ranks among the world's largest issuers of crypto ETFs, boasting a portfolio of 59 exchange-traded products that are listed on 13 different exchanges and managing more than $5.4 billion in assets under management as of Feb. 11, based on information available on its website.
This partnership expansion arrives less than one month following BitGo's milestone achievement, when the digital asset infrastructure company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, commenced trading on the New York Stock Exchange operating under the ticker symbol BTGO.
Staking moves deeper into regulated products
Over the past several months, institutional custody platforms have progressively integrated staking services into their fundamental service offerings, driven by increasing investor demand for yield-generating cryptocurrency infrastructure solutions.
Last October, Coinbase broadened its integration with Figment, a staking infrastructure provider, enabling clients using Coinbase Prime and Coinbase Custody to stake Avalanche (AVAX), Aptos (APT), Sui (SUI) and Solana (SOL) directly through their Coinbase custody accounts.
Approximately one month following that development, Anchorage Digital formed a partnership with Figment to introduce staking capabilities for Hyperliquid (HYPE), making the service available through Anchorage Digital Bank as well as its Singapore-based entity, while also providing access through its Porto self-custody wallet solution.
On Feb. 9, Ripple announced the expansion of its institutional custody platform via integrations with both Securosys and Figment, incorporating hardware security module support that enables banks and custody providers to deliver crypto custody and staking services without the necessity of operating their own validator nodes or key management infrastructure.
Concurrently, there has been a notable surge in institutional interest surrounding liquid staking, a mechanism that permits investors to generate proof-of-stake rewards while simultaneously receiving a tradable token that maintains the liquidity of their underlying digital assets.
Earlier this week on Tuesday, Hex Trust, a custody provider based in Hong Kong, revealed its partnership with the Jito Foundation to integrate JitoSOL, which functions as a liquid staking token operating on the Solana blockchain, allowing its clients to generate staking and MEV rewards while maintaining the liquidity of their SOL holdings and preserving eligibility for utilization as collateral in borrowing and lending activities through its markets platform.