BNY taps Figment to support staking on its digital asset custody platform

BNY launched its Digital Asset Custody service in 2022 for institutional holders of bitcoin and ether, years after Ethereum's 2022 shift to proof-of-stake made validator rewards possible. Rivals such as Coinbase Custody and Anchorage already layer staking onto custody, leaving BNY playing catch-up. Figment, a validator operator that already serves exchanges and asset managers, becomes the infrastructure partner rather than BNY building its own nodes.

Banks holding client ETH through BNY can now generate staking rewards without moving assets to a separate platform or signing with a standalone staking provider. SOL support, promised later, will extend that to Solana holders once live. Custody clients gain yield from idle holdings inside the same compliance wrapper; specialist staking-as-a-service firms lose a slice of institutional business that previously needed a dedicated vendor relationship.

Folding staking into custody blurs the line between safekeeping and active asset management, a shift banks have resisted until institutional demand and competitor moves made it unavoidable. Relying on a single outside validator operator also concentrates operational risk: if Figment's infrastructure falters, BNY's custody clients feel it directly. That trade-off between convenience and dependency on one vendor is the real cost of bundling staking into a bank's existing workflow.

The near-term marker is SOL's addition to the service, which will show whether BNY can extend staking across chains quickly or treats ETH as a one-off pilot. Watch also whether other custodians respond with their own Figment-style validator partnerships, and whether BNY discloses fee terms or slashing-risk disclosures as adoption scales among its banking clients.

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