Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency
Coinbase Custody amasses $1 billion in AUM in one year
The chief executive officer of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, has revealed that the company’s custody solution is enjoying significant interest from crypto investors.
During a panel at Coindesk’s Consensus crypto conference, Armstrong said that in just one year after its launch Coinbase Custody had amassed $1 billion in assets under management.
“We launched our custody 12 months ago, we’ve just crossed $1 billion AUM or institutions, 70 institutions have signed up, adding about $150 million AUM a month, so, to a large degree that has been a success,” Armstrong said, as quoted by Coindesk.
The CEO also noted that the institutional clients using the service were looking beyond simply storing their crypto assets at Coinbase Custody.
“They want to be staking and voting, doing governance on-chain,” Armstrong said. “I think that will grow rapidly.”
Armstrong and his fellow panelist, Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson, pointed out that the clients using the service are not big traditional institutions such as BlackRock or Goldman Sachs.
“For [traditional institutions] to take their chips and go all in, I don’t see that in the next year or two,” Wilson said.
Still, Custody’s success indicates that Coinbase’s growing focus on institutional investors is starting to pay off. Armstrong revealed that the company’s trading platform for professional traders, Coinbase Pro, had more than half of its trading volume coming from institutions.
Coinbase launched Custody on May 15, 2018, as part of a suite of products geared towards institutional investors. The company said at the time that it believed that the products would “accelerate the rate of institutional adoption and create a more mature and diverse market”.
Earlier this month, Coinbase announced that Custody now supported over 30 crypto assets, including popular digital currencies such as Bitcoin, Ripple and Litecoin, as well as smaller projects like Kin and Maker Dai. Nearly 20 of these assets have been added in 2019.
Featured image: Primakov / Shutterstock.com
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