The bank’s long-signaled crypto custody service has a product name as it continues to target a launch this year.
Original Image Credits: Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine / flickr.com
Posted August 18, 2026 at 3:46 pm EST.
Citi unveiled a custody platform called Custody+ on Tuesday, disclosing that it “expects to go live with digital asset custody later this year, starting with the custody of Bitcoin.”
It is the first time Citi has folded its long-signaled crypto custody work into a named product. It is still not a launch date. The release gives no month, no client tier, and no detail on how the bank will hold or insure the keys.
What Citi Is Selling
Custody+ is aimed at institutional investors trading in compressed settlement cycles and around the clock. Citi said the U.S. rollout of its patented Single Event Processing technology is complete, that more than 80% of its total event volume is now processed in real time, and that voluntary corporate action processing times have fallen by up to 92%, with 96% of U.S. voluntary events now handled in under two hours. The custody business supports clients in over 100 markets, including 62 proprietary ones, and Citi says its services arm invests more than $2 billion a year in platform strategy.
“Custody+ is the product of a multi-year commitment to building infrastructure that matches the speed of our clients’ strategies,” said Amit Agarwal, head of custody at Citi Investor Services.
Only bitcoin is in scope at the start, which leaves ether and the assets behind the rest of the institutional ETF complex outside the service on day one.
A Plan Years in the Making
Citi said in October that it aimed to custody native crypto tokens in 2026, a project Biswarup Chatterjee, its global head of partnerships and innovation, described then as two to three years in development. The accounting obstacle cleared in early 2025, when the SEC rescinded Staff Accounting Bulletin 121, the guidance that had pushed banks to treat customer crypto as a balance sheet liability.
The pitch to allocators is consolidation. Clients would hold bitcoin inside the same framework as their equities and bonds, with a global bank as counterparty instead of a crypto-native custodian. That matters most to funds whose mandates make a crypto-native custodian hard to approve. It will, however, not be the first major bank to offer crypto custody, as BNY already does.
Related Listen: Inside the Coldcard Hack That Drained Over $100 Million in Bitcoin: Uneasy Money
AI-assisted content: This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and was reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by a member of the Unchained editorial team before publication.
Business,bitcoin custody,Citi,institutional investors,yahoobitcoin custody,Citi,institutional investors,yahoo#Citi #Puts #Bitcoin #Custody #Custody #Suite #Targets #Launch1787083119
