Capital Union, a Bahamas-based bank that is said to own a percentage of the Tether (USDT) stablecoin issuer’s reserves, and a large variety of digital assets as part of its trading and custody services.
A spokesman for Capital Union told Cointelegraph on May 31 that the bank has begun offering crypto trading and custody services to its professional clients as part of the firm’s trading desk.
“We collaborate with a select group of trading venues and liquidity providers, as well as a select group of custodians and technology providers, allowing us to handle a wide range of digital assets as part of our trading and custody services,” the firm’s spokesperson explained.
The spokesman emphasized that Capital Union’s crypto-related services make up a “very modest fraction” of the company’s overall business, which is primarily focused on delivering traditional wealth management and financial services.
The spokesman did not specify which cryptocurrencies are supported on the Capital Union platform or when they were first introduced, just saying:
“We do not have a directional view on crypto markets or on any specific coins but as a forward looking financial institution have chosen to enable our professional clients to trade in this new asset class should they desire to do so.”
Capital Union has also been aggressively working on building “transactional blockchain-related capabilities,” according to the spokesman, since the bank believes this to be a “major disruption for the financial industry.”
Following a May 30 story suggesting that Tether housed some of its reserves at the Capital Union bank, Capital Union made its latest crypto-related comments.
Capital Union’s annual reports contain the sole publicly available information from the bank, according to the person.
Capital Union, which was founded in 2013, had $1 billion in assets under management by the end of 2020. In April 2022, the bank teamed with Chainalysis to facilitate the safe and compliant deployment of its crypto offerings, such as trading and custody.
The Bahamas was one of the first countries to establish a regulatory framework known as the DARE Act in 2020, according to a spokeswoman for the bank.
Capital Union’s spokesman explained, “As a locally regulated bank, this permits us to offer crypto-related services to our clients, which include financial institutions, financial intermediaries, and professional investors.”
