Standard Chartered enters the market, breaking the crypto circle

Author: Bruce Source: X, @zbreezea

On July 15, 2025, Standard Chartered Bank said that its UK subsidiary will officially open BTC and ETH spot trading services to institutional clients.

This is the first global systemically important bank (G-SIB) to truly incorporate crypto assets into its own trading system: not hanging an ETF, not investing in a fund, but personally matching, clearing, and custody, one-stop service.

It is not difficult to understand the reason behind it: BTC continues to refresh ATH, and Trump's latest statement of "strong support for encryption" has made institutional clients' willingness to allocate unprecedentedly high.

This time, it is no longer a knock on the door to test the water, but the bank itself opened the door and walked in.

Is this just a "regulatory-friendly" PR case, or a real watershed?

Standard Chartered is not "providing a channel" this time, but is really on the table. Unlike the so-called "cooperation and openness" in the past, Standard Chartered is not entrusting third-party brokers or market makers to package products, nor is it holding ETFs on behalf of others, but doing on-site trading itself. This is not "packaging crypto assets into traditional products and selling them to customers", but "allowing customers to trade crypto assets directly". Standard Chartered is not the first bank to want to do this. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup all want to do it. As early as 2017, they started to set up laboratories and pilot projects. Even BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank are watching. But they all stopped at the "regulatory red light" - everyone is afraid that if they are not handled properly, it will become "involving illegal securities transactions" and "unauthorized provision of digital currency services", and even be attacked by the SEC, FCA, and MAS. Standard Chartered stepped on the accelerator and pushed the fifth gear directly: It is not secretly doing OTC, nor is it a gray structured product, but it is clearly stated: We want to be an "institutional crypto trading market" and directly access BTC and ETH.

Who can do this? Only Standard Chartered. Many people's first reaction is: Why Standard Chartered? Why dare? Why dare? Because the regulatory environment in which the small slag is located is more flexible, the historical burden is lighter, and the encryption layout is also early. In fact, if you are familiar with the style and history of the traditional financial circle, you will know that Standard Chartered has never been the kind of "good student" type of big bank. It is not well-behaved and a little naughty. It has always had two labels in the investment banking circle: willing to take risks + standing on the edge. And Standard Chartered is not the kind of "too big to fail" central bank, not Goldman Sachs, not Morgan, nor Barclays or HSBC.

The core of its business has always been in the "marginal market", Africa, the Middle East, Asia (especially Singapore and Hong Kong).

To put it simply: in the financial center circles such as New York, London, and Frankfurt, it is not the most mainstream "rule-making person", but in the marginal market, it can often "get the trend early and take a step ahead of the old guys".

In fact, if you often watch the news, you will realize that Standard Chartered has been eyeing encryption for a long time.

As early as 2018, Standard Chartered participated in Ripple's cross-border payment experiment.

In 2021, it established Zodia Custody, a compliant digital asset custody platform, and obtained regulatory licenses from the Bank of England and FCA.

In 2023, it built Zodia Markets, an OTC encryption platform for institutional clients.

In other words, it was not a "sudden whim", but it had already laid some groundwork, tested the water, and obtained the license. It's just that it has always been "sneaky into the village, don't shoot guns", and it's not clear. Now, the supervision is relaxed, MiCA has landed, Hong Kong and Singapore are competing to be the portal of Web3-Standard Chartered said I want to reveal the secret, so I revealed the secret and became the first bank to eat crabs.

We have heard the term "institutional entry" so many times in the cryptocurrency circle. In 2017, we said this, and the result was BitConnect; In 2020, we said this, and the result was MicroStrategy breaking into the spotlight; In 2021, we still said this, but found that institutions only play ETFs, and transactions are still completed on Coinbase. Now, Standard Chartered has done something that no one has done before: incorporating crypto assets into the bank account system. It has three levels of impact:

For traditional financial institutions: turning BTC and ETH into "compliant assets", the biggest change now is that BTC can be "legally accounted". In the past, even large institutions that wanted to allocate some BTC had to take a detour: Use ETFs? Buy Grayscale GBTC? Through offshore funds?

These operations are not only complicated in process, but also have huge liquidity discounts. Not to mention the need for compliant custody, reporting, and auditing. But now, Standard Chartered says: Institutions, you can open an account with me. Your BTC will be held, cleared, and quoted under compliance supervision, just like buying a bond. From then on, crypto assets had the entry ticket to "mainstream financial products" for the first time. For the crypto industry: it also weakened the biggest "pain point" - trust.

The focus this time is not on "a certain institution bought tens of millions of BTC", which has happened before. The real difference is that from now on, BTC can be used as a compliant investment target, appearing in the strategy model, written into the asset allocation report, audited, and included in the quarterly risk control table. It is no longer an alternative position of "buy a little and try", but a formal asset that can be systematically incorporated into the management logic. This is called entry. Moreover, we all know that large institutions and sovereign countries will not rush to the exchange to place orders to buy coins like retail investors when they want to allocate crypto assets. They want to buy BTC, and they buy volume, compliance, stability, and ruthlessness. They can easily make orders of tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, which can easily blow up the market. Therefore, they usually take the over-the-counter (OTC) route, which is an underground channel that "does not alarm the market" - the price is negotiated, the quantity is locked, and there is no ripple in the open market. The counterparty may be a professional market maker, or it may be a mining farm, a fund, or even a dedicated institutional department under a crypto broker, such as Coinbase Prime and Gemini Pro. The advantage of doing this is that it is clear, with small slippage, fast speed, and no one watching the market to see your large-scale entry and exit. In order to make this process more like traditional finance, they often also connect to the encrypted "prime brokerage service" - the so-called Prime Brokerage. This is not a new concept, Wall Street has been using it for decades. Its advantage is that it packages trading, clearing, custody, lending, and data services into a complete set. You just decide whether to buy or not, and someone will help you take care of the rest. Of course, if you are a sovereign fund, or you are responsible for auditing and compliance, you will not touch the coin directly. Many times they choose to "take a long way" - such as buying spot BTC ETF. Or buy a share on a traditional stock exchange, and the custodian institution actually holds the coin behind the scenes, and you just hold a ticket. This ticket is linked to the price of the coin, but you don't have to worry about wallets, private keys, KYC, money laundering regulations and so on. How to do an audit and how to go through the approval process have been gone through countless times. It's true that they bought BTC, but they followed a system they are familiar with. That is a set of game rules that do not rely on FOMO but on the system.

I've gone too far, let's go back to the second level of impact: In terms of supervision and policy direction, this is a victory of policy testing. Behind this incident, it is actually a "stress test" of the existing policy caliber. Standard Chartered can do this, and it must have communicated with a series of compliance institutions such as FCA and Singapore MAS.

Once this matter is not blocked, it will become a "breakthrough" in the real sense.

That is to say, this time it is not a certain bank that "secretly does crypto business", but the supervision has already released it. This is a big deal.

Finally, the long-term impact of this matter: not only a bull market catalyst, but also a rewrite of the gameplay. Really, don't think of it as a news of "bank buying coins". It is actually a drastic reversal of the underlying narrative of the financial system.

DeFi and TradFi, for the first time, sat at the same table. The development of the trend is reversing the view of the entire industry: everyone initially thought that the Web3 world is an "alternative world" and that it is the banks that are going to be revolutionized. But now it seems more like a parallel world, and these two worlds are beginning to have "interfaces" through Standard Chartered: TradFi has clearing, custody, anti-money laundering, and risk control mechanisms; DeFi has trustlessness, transparency, liquidity design, and programmability.

In the past, the two did not recognize each other, but now the interfaces are beginning to connect. And this fusion will give birth to many "unpredictable" new products: such as on-chain bonds, programmatically hedged encrypted structured notes, DeFi modular banking services, etc. And in the future, institutional cognition will completely change the "qualitativeness" of BTC/ETH BTC and ETH should no longer be defined as "speculative assets". You can choose not to buy, but you cannot help but explain why you don't buy. Because they will enter the bank's "strategy department meeting", the asset management company's "annual allocation weight model", and the pension's "alternative asset basket". Just like 20 years ago, no one dared to allocate Chinese A shares, and 10 years ago, no one allocated BTC. Now, it has officially come in, and banks are taking the lead. We will see more institutions launch similar services in the next 12 months, and BTC and ETH will become the new generation of "quasi-gold + technology stocks". This is not a prediction, and it is even a very conservative view.

Standard Chartered is the beginning, not the climax, don't get too excited. This is just an appetizer, the real climax is behind. What we should really focus on are two questions: Who will be the next? JPMorgan Chase, Citi, HSBC, BNP Paribas? Do they dare to take over?

Will this set of services be expanded to "broader on-chain assets"? Standard Chartered currently only supports BTC and ETH, but if this is stable, what will be the next step? You figure it out yourself.

At that time, crypto assets truly entered the "structured product era", and the financial infrastructure of Web3 was further greatly improved. The significance of this moment is not that a traditional bank finally recognized the status of BTC. But a reality: BTC and ETH have become an integral part of modern finance. Don't underestimate this small step, this one move may be no less than Armstrong's small step. This is an old world's recognition of the new order, a surrender of realism, and an expansion of the pattern. In the past, we said that "the currency circle is a substitute for banks", but now we have to change our words - banks are starting to do business in the currency circle.

Cryptocurrency gradually no longer needs an "underground revolution", it must come in peacefully. You ask, when will the institutions enter the market? They are already there. You ask, what about Coinbase? I guess it has to choose a side - to be the pipeline of the future bank, or to continue to carry the banner of "decentralization" and compete with traditional finance. What do ordinary people do? Ordinary people should not only look at the rise and fall. This is not that the assets have risen, but the structure is changing. From wallets to governance, from transactions to custody, Standard Chartered's move is not just the bank's effort - the entire old financial system has begun to make room for the new world. OK, take a breath. After I have described the Standard Chartered incident as objectively as possible, what I want to say most is: Even if Standard Chartered enters the game, even if BlackRock holds high the banner of ETF, even if mainstream finance is finally willing to write BTC into the quarterly report, we have to admit: This is far from the end of encryption and it has been completely integrated with mainstream society.

On the contrary, it is more like the beginning of a diversion.

Some people have entered a more comfortable interface, more stable compliance products, and more familiar asset allocation models; while others are still willing to keep cold wallets, stare at the addresses on the chain, and use their own private keys to defend asset sovereignty.

They know that no matter how much the financial system embraces encryption, it will not keep your freedom for you.

They understand better: true decentralization is not in the menu, but in the behavior.

As long as there are still people who choose to keep their own assets, judge their own risks, write their own addresses and sign to confirm, the core spirit of BTC is still spreading.

There will always be people who regard freedom as a habit, not a service.