Citi on Tuesday unveiled a custody platform called Custody+ and said it expects to go live with digital asset custody later in 2026, starting with bitcoin. The disclosure marks the first time the bank has placed its long-signaled crypto custody work inside a named product.
It is not, however, a launch date. Citi gave no month for the rollout, no detail on which client tier would get access first, and no explanation of how the bank plans to hold or insure the keys.
What Citi says Custody+ is built for
Citi said Custody+ is aimed at institutional investors trading in compressed settlement cycles and around-the-clock markets.
The bank said the U.S. rollout of its patented Single Event Processing technology is complete. More than 80% of its total event volume is now processed in real time. Citi also said voluntary corporate action processing times have dropped by as much as 92%, with 96% of U.S. voluntary events now handled in under two hours.
Its custody business supports clients in more than 100 markets, including 62 proprietary ones, according to the release. Citi also said its services arm invests more than $2 billion each year in platform strategy.
Amit Agarwal, head of custody at Citi Investor Services, said, 「Custody+ is the product of a multi-year commitment to building infrastructure that matches the speed of our clients strategies.」
Bitcoin first, other crypto assets excluded at launch
Only bitcoin is included at the start. That leaves ether and the assets behind the rest of the institutional ETF complex outside the service on day one.
A project Citi has been building for years
Citi said in October that it was aiming to custody native crypto tokens in 2026. At that time, Biswarup Chatterjee, the bank’s global head of partnerships and innovation, described the effort as a project that had been in development for two to three years.
An accounting hurdle shifted in early 2025, when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rescinded Staff Accounting Bulletin 121, or SAB 121. That guidance had pushed banks to treat customer crypto as a balance sheet liability.
The consolidation pitch to institutional allocators
Citi’s pitch is consolidation. Clients would be able to hold bitcoin in the same framework as equities and bonds, using a global bank as counterparty instead of a crypto-native custodian.
That is particularly relevant for funds whose mandates make a crypto-native custodian difficult to approve.
Citi would still not be the first major bank to offer crypto custody. BNY already does.