Zodia CEO: Every Bank Will Need to Hold Digital Assets

Every single bank will soon need to hold digital assets, says Zodia CEO Julian Sawyer. Sawyer confirmed that Standard Chartered's full acquisition of the firm is on track to target a signing at the end of June and complete by the end of August.

By Olivier Acuna | Edited by Jamie Crawley — Jun 3, 2026, 3:08 p.m. | 3 min read

What to know:

• Standard Chartered is set to fully acquire Zodia Custody by the end of August, folding its digital custody operations into the bank and effectively retiring the Zodia Custody brand.
• The deal underscores how major banks are abandoning in-house experiments and instead buying established crypto platforms to gain trusted, institutional-grade technology for digital asset custody, tokenization and stablecoin payments.
• As global banks move deeper into digital assets, regulation is converging across jurisdictions, with rapid progress in Asia and the Middle East and the broader crypto industry increasingly aligning with traditional banking rules such as KYC and AML.

Zodia Custody CEO Julian Sawyer says the sale of his firm to a TradFi entity is a huge win for the crypto industry. (Olivier Acuna/CoinDesk)

Julian Sawyer, CEO of Zodia Custody, described Standard Chartered's ongoing acquisition of the firm as a "major validation" that highlights a growing reality in mainstream finance: legacy banks cannot build institutional-grade digital asset custody safely or efficiently without proper software. Instead of treating crypto as an isolated sector, Sawyer noted that the industry is hitting a maturity point where the underlying blockchain infrastructure is moving toward real-world asset tokenization and stablecoin payments.

"This is the maturity point of where custody of the blockchain... is moving from crypto to other assets, stable coins and tokenization," he said in an interview with CoinDesk on Wednesday. "If you're going to do that, you need trust. Trust is what banks do."

Because these financial use cases require absolute trust, global banks are moving to acquire established platforms to gain immediate scale and secure bank-grade tech. Sawyer noted that client interest in their infrastructure software has scaled dramatically.

"Every single bank is going to need to know how to hold digital assets," Sawyer said. "The big guys are absolutely looking, and everybody else who's thinking about stablecoins... thinking about tokenization needs to have an answer. So the market is huge."

Sawyer confirmed that Standard Chartered's full acquisition of the firm is on track to target a signing at the end of June and complete by the end of August. He declined to disclose the purchase amount or valuation. In 2023, Zodia announced a $36 million funding round led by SBI Holdings. Market estimates place the custodian's annual revenue at roughly $34.6 million, with current total funding of roughly $46 million.

He said that under the acquisition agreement, Standard Chartered's existing digital custody business in Dubai, Luxembourg, and Hong Kong will merge with Zodia Custody and ultimately fold into Standard Chartered under its brand, meaning Zodia Custody will not exist in the medium term. Concurrently, a new entity called Zodia Solutions will carry forward the software and infrastructure side of the business, backed by existing bank shareholders including Northern Trust, Emirates NBD, and National Australia Bank.

"This is a major validation," Sawyer said, detailing the systemic impact of the consolidation. "Every bank in the world is going to do something with digital assets... they are going to need to know and have some technology to be able to hold those assets."

Global regulation. Institutional integration is forcing a regulatory convergence worldwide. When asked whether the U.K. is h