Institutional staking provider Chorus One had announced this past that it integrated with Ledger Enterprise in order to bring self-custodial, governance-ready staking for ETH, SOL, DOT, and XTZ. This will allow institutions to earn staking rewards directly from Ledger’s enterprise-grade custody environment, without transferring asset custody or compromising internal governance controls.
The integration combines Ledger Enterprise’s hardware-secured key management, multi-authorization workflows and auditability with Chorus One’s institutional validator infrastructure and research-driven staking operations.
It’s designed specifically for institutions that want staking yields while maintaining strict security, compliance, and governance requirements.
Damien Scanlon, Chief Product Officer at Chorus One, has shared insights with CI on how institutional staking is evolving, why self-custody remains critical and what this means for Proof-of-Stake adoption by funds, banks, and corporates.
Insights from Damien Scanlon are shared below.
Damien Scanlon: As a long-time partner of Ledger, we’re thrilled to expand our collaboration to Ledger Enterprise. This extension strengthens our shared mission to serve leading institutional platforms with secure, reliable, and scalable staking infrastructure. We’re particularly encouraged by the strong interest from shared clients of which some have already begun testing.
Over the past two years, we’ve seen a meaningful shift in how institutions think about staking. What began as a yield-seeking activity has evolved into something far more structural.
Today, staking is increasingly treated as a core component of digital asset operations – one that touches custody, governance, compliance, and long-term risk management.
This change didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen for ideological reasons. It happened because institutions learned, sometimes the hard way, that control matters.
Custody matters. Governance matters. And abstracting these elements away in the name of convenience introduces risks that simply don’t align with institutional mandates.
For a long time, the dominant model for institutional staking relied on centralized intermediaries.
Assets were deposited, staking happened somewhere behind the scenes, and rewards were paid out. From the outside, this looked efficient.
Internally, however, it created blind spots: who controlled the keys, who exercised governance rights, and how operational risk was managed across the stack.
Post-2022, those blind spots became impossible to ignore. Counterparty risk moved from an abstract concept to a concrete line item in boardroom discussions. Regulators began asking sharper questions.
Internal risk teams started treating staking infrastructure with the same scrutiny applied to custody, treasury management, and market exposure. In that environment, the old “hands-off” staking model stopped making sense.
What we’re seeing now is not institutions stepping back from staking: it’s institutions demanding better primitives.
They want staking that fits within their existing governance frameworks, not outside of them. They want staking to be auditable, policy-driven, and aligned with fiduciary responsibility. And critically, they want to retain custody.
This is where self-custodial staking becomes less of a preference and more of a baseline requirement.
Self-custody doesn’t mean institutions want to run validators themselves or manage infrastructure internally.
What it means is that they want cryptographic control over assets and explicit authority over governance decisions.
Validators, in this model, are infrastructure partners, not asset custodians and not governance proxies.
That distinction is subtle, but it’s fundamental.
Proof-of-Stake networks embed governance directly into validator operations.
Validators vote on upgrades, parameter changes, and economic decisions that materially affect asset risk profiles.
For institutions with long-term exposure, outsourcing those decisions without visibility or control creates a structural mismatch.
The assets sit on the balance sheet, but the decision-making power lives elsewhere.
Increasingly, institutions are unwilling to accept that trade-off.
At the same time, self-custody used to come with a real operational cost.
Managing private keys securely, enforcing approval workflows, and producing compliance-grade reporting required bespoke tooling and deep internal expertise.
For many institutions, that complexity outweighed the benefits.
That’s changed.
The institutional tooling around self-custody has matured significantly. Hardware-secured key management, policy-based governance, multi-authorization workflows, and audit-ready reporting are no longer niche capabilities.
They’re becoming standard expectations.
This evolution is what allows self-custodial staking to scale beyond early adopters and into mainstream institutional operations.
From Chorus One’s perspective, our role sits squarely in this new middle ground.
We operate and secure validator infrastructure, manage performance and risk at the protocol level, and provide deep research into network economics and governance dynamics.
What we don’t do is take custody or remove governance authority from clients.
That separation of responsibilities is intentional.
Institutions don’t want a single counterparty that controls everything. They want modularity: clear boundaries between custody, governance, and infrastructure.
When those components are decoupled but interoperable, institutions can build staking operations that mirror the controls they already use in traditional finance.
The integration of institutional validators with self-custody platforms reflects this broader convergence. It’s not about making staking “easier” in a consumer sense. It’s about making staking compatible with institutional reality.
Another important shift is how institutions classify staking internally.
Historically, staking rewards were often viewed as yield, something closer to passive income.
Today, many institutions are reframing staking as part of asset ownership itself. Participating in consensus, securing the network, and exercising governance are increasingly seen as responsibilities that come with holding Proof-of-Stake assets.
That reframing has consequences.
Once staking is treated as a balance-sheet activity rather than a yield product, the tolerance for opaque execution drops sharply.
Every step: delegation, validator selection, governance participation – needs to be defensible, documented, and aligned with internal policy.
This is also why governance has moved to the center of the conversation. Institutions don’t just want to earn rewards; they want to understand how protocol decisions are made and how those decisions affect long-term value.
Validator research, voting behavior, and risk mitigation strategies are no longer peripheral – they’re core inputs.
At Chorus One, we’ve seen this firsthand. Institutional clients increasingly ask detailed questions about governance philosophy, upgrade risk, and protocol economics.
They want transparency not just into performance metrics, but into how decisions are made under uncertainty. That level of engagement simply isn’t possible in black-box staking models.
Looking ahead, I don’t think this trend will reverse.
As more capital moves on-chain and Proof-of-Stake continues to underpin major networks, institutional expectations will keep rising.
Self-custody, governance control, and infrastructure transparency will become table stakes rather than differentiators.
What’s changing is not institutions’ appetite for crypto exposure…. it’s their definition of acceptable infrastructure.
The next phase of institutional staking won’t be defined by who offers the highest headline yield.
It will be defined by who can deliver staking that integrates cleanly into institutional governance, security, and risk frameworks.
In that world, validators are no longer invisible plumbing.
They are accountable infrastructure providers operating alongside custodians, auditors, and compliance teams.
That’s the direction the market is moving, and it’s a sign that institutional staking is finally growing up.