Zodia Custody, a digital asset custodian backed by Standard Chartered, SBI Holdings, and Northern Trust, recently partnered with Kiln, an enterprise-grade staking service provider. This allows its institutional clients to benefit from Kiln’s staking services, providing institutions greater flexibility.
Zodia Custody’s clients will now have access to ETH, SOL, DOT, ADA, and BNB, with more protocols planned for future integration through Kiln.
This is timely, given the institutional interest in staking as a yield-generating strategy. As the Zodia Custody Gateway partner, Kiln can leverage Zodia Custody‘s bank-grade platform.
And in a strategic move that underscores Zodia Custody‘s commitment to building trusted, compliant products, Anoosh Arevshatian is transitioning from Chief Risk Officer to Chief Product Officer.
Anoosh’s expertise in risk management and compliance will be instrumental in shaping Zodia Custody’s product roadmap and ensuring its alignment with institutional needs.
Anoosh Arevshatian, Chief Product Officer of Zodia Custody, discusses the importance of risk and compliance in product development and its product roadmap.
Our conversation with Anoosh Arevshatian is shared below.
Crowdfund Insider: You are transitioning from chief risk officer to chief product officer. Tell us about your new role.
Anoosh Arevshatian: My transition from Chief Risk Officer to Chief Product Officer signals Zodia Custody’s commitment to implementing a security-first, utility-rich set of products that empower our institutional clients to embrace the regulated digital asset future.
In this new role, I will support the team to scale our digital asset custody and wallet offering, enabling our clients to access a broad range of value-added utilities and integrated participants within the digital asset ecosystem. Given that wallet infrastructure is the foundation of most digital asset interactions, we are developing a seamless, well-connected, and regulation-ready offering for our clients.
On the product side, this means delivering solutions that help our clients maximise their capital efficiency by providing access to pre-vetted services that make their assets work for them – including staking for yield generation and collateral purposes.
Crowdfund Insider: What experiences from your role as chief risk officer are you carrying into your new role as chief product officer?
Anoosh Arevshatian: It may seem surprising, but if you think about it, a Chief Risk Officer in the Second Line of Defense is not there to say “No” to innovation. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The CRO encourages a business to take the right risks and to find pragmatic yet innovative solutions to bring products and processes within risk appetite.
I’m carrying all of these principles and a sense of client-centricity verging on obsession into the new role to help us deliver products that are of value to our institutional clients. The fact that I’ll be supported by a formidable, pragmatic Second Line of Defense on the other side should reassure our clients that we’ll be deploying the right innovative capabilities to market – quickly and safely.
Crowdfund Insider: What trends do you foresee driving institutional adoption of digital assets in the coming year?
Anoosh Arevshatian: 2024 really was the first year of material institutional flows into digital assets and this serves as the perfect stepping stone into 2025. At the end of the day, further institutional flows will be largely driven through regulatory clarity, revenue and cost optimisation, or efficiency opportunities.
The launch of the crypto spot ETFs and the subsequent inflows proved institutional interest in exposure to digital assets. Stablecoins represented a use case in which institutional investors understood their utility in capital markets and beyond, leading to a growing new client base. As institutions continue to revise their appetite towards direct and indirect exposures to digital assets, we will see wider adoption and greater capital allocation – even from the most traditionally conservative market segments. The increased fusion between tokenised real-world assets and their use in traditional financial activities also serves as the backbone to further growth.
More importantly, the certainty brought on by regulatory developments in major markets – namely MiCA in Europe and an impending crypto regulatory framework in the US – has piqued institutional interest in the space. There have already been additional positive developments this year with the repeal of SAB 121. There is still work to be done on creating integrated infrastructure to support institutional volumes, rather than the customised bi-lateral arrangements that are prevalent in the industry today.
Crowdfund Insider: In your opinion, what are the key considerations that institutions looking to diversify into digital assets need to address?
Anoosh Arevshatian: Institutions wanting to gain exposure to digital assets need to understand the use cases driving their clients’ needs for involvement in the space. It’s important to have an underlying rationale for being involved in the space – be it speculative, as a hedge against traditional assets, or for efficiency or cost-optimisation purposes. Once use cases are clear, it’s about building a reliable network of ecosystem partners to deliver on each specific use case – be it custodians, trading venues, liquidity sources or other value-added services.
The way I see it, custody is essentially the plumbing of the institutional digital assets ecosystem; it’s a must-have in order to interact in the space and extensive due diligence on selecting the right custodian is a non-negotiable.
If I had to narrow it down, the five most important factors would be:
– Security of private keys
– Legal rights and clarity over private keys and their application
– Operationally, how instructions to apply the private keys to sign transactions are controlled
– Financial Crime: how compliance with bank-grade control requirements and AML requirements in multiple jurisdictions are achieved
– Utility, access, and connectivity to other digital asset activities and participants
With Zodia Custody’s bank-bred, bank-owned heritage, we do not compromise on the factors above and this year, we’ll be working to turbocharge the utility on our platform.
Crowdfund Insider: As you enter your new role, what are you aiming to communicate to both existing and potential Zodia Custody clients?
Anoosh Arevshatian: Moving away from self-custody and choosing a digital asset custodian is one of the least glamorous but most important decisions you’ll make as an institution entering the digital asset market. In a bull market, now more than ever is the time to make wise decisions.
There is no other global digital asset custody solution that understands the spectrum of needs from traditional financial markets institutions all the way to crypto-native participants and provides a bank-grade offering. I’d like our clients and prospects to know that Zodia Custody sits at this unique cross-section and is ready to power our clients’ middle and back-office operations and allow them to thrive in the digital assets space.
We see four areas of focus for our product suite.
● First is a focus on what our clients know us for – our scalable wallet infrastructure. The Zodia Custody platform allows clients to engage with products directly from their Zodia Custody wallet, making continued investment in and focus on our wallet infrastructure critical.
● Second are treasury solutions that support our clients in maximising their capital efficiency – through access to potential rewards, elimination of pre-funding needs, and more
● Third is our settlement solution – Interchange. We are building Interchange as the first port of call for institutions pre- and post-trade and are working with a strong network of venues to power our clients’ trading and financing needs, whilst maintaining the security of their assets within our platform.
● Fourth – our Software as a Service offering, which is based on all of our experience in the first three areas above and combined with consultancy and middle office operations.
Finally, we know that to be relevant to our clients, we must be involved in emerged/emerging areas such as Tokenisation, Payments, and Institutional DeFi. 2025 already saw a hive of activity in the digital assets market and there’s not a better time to strengthen your digital asset foundations and infrastructure with Zodia Custody.