According to foreign media, the Bitcoin Trust Market in the United States is moving from being dominated by encrypted originals to accelerating entry by large banks. The key to this change is not the sudden interest of banks in bitcoin, but the institutional operating income generated by hosting, clearing and ancillary services.
Citicorp released on August 18, Custody+, plans to go online by 2026 and incorporate bitcoin into its current hosting system. According to the article, the size of Citicorp ' s hosting and administrative assets managed as of June 2026 was $34.5 trillion, which made its new move one of the industry ' s trends.
Regulatory barriers eased after 2025
According to the article, banks enter this market in large numbers, first and foremost through changes in regulatory conditions. In January 2025, the United States SEC revoked SAB 121 through SAB 122 and removed the requirement to confirm the corresponding liability on its balance sheet when holding encrypted assets on behalf of clients.
This adjustment changed the cost structure of the bank. Previously, large amounts of bitcoin had to be held in trust by banks, which had led to the limited attractiveness of the operation to large institutions. A few months later, the United States Monetary Supervisory Authority confirmed that the National Bank could provide secure asset hosting and could conduct related operations without prior individual authorization.
The article also mentioned that the GENIUS Act, which was signed into law in July 2025, provided a clearer federal banking path for digital asset hosting, although it was mainly aimed at stabilizing currencies. Initial progress has been made in the areas of Circle, Paxos, Bitgo, Fidelity Digital Assemblys and Ripple.
Large custodian banks have landed.
At present, Melon Bank in New York is making the fastest progress among traditional banks. The Bank ' s hosting assets, amounting to US$ 59.4 trillion, have long been provided to ETF issuers with bitcoin and Etherport hosting and extended related services to the Abu Dhabi global market in May 2026.
In January 2026, the Bank launched a digital asset platform covering wallet management, hosting and settlement. Slag beats the choice to integrate Zodia Custody, who was involved in its creation, and to integrate the existing encryption hosting capability into the business of the business and the investment bank. The United States Bank has also provided related hosting support to fund managers and stable currency reserves.
- Melon, New York: served ETF distributor and hosted RLUD reserve
- Dauphou Bank: Platform for supporting tokenization funds, deposits and stable coins
- Citigroup: planned to launch Custody+ by 2026
Coinbase Trust Status under Test
According to the article, Coinbase Custody currently manages approximately $37.6 billion in corporate encryption assets and provides hosting services for over 80 per cent of the United States spot bitcoin and ETF. This makes it one of the most direct competitions after the banks are officially active.
The advantages of traditional banks are not only in the trust itself, but also in the ability to package hosting, foreign exchange, liquidity management, settlement and primary brokerage operations to institutional customers, as compared to the encoded original institution. This integrated service is easier to embed in existing processes for the institution that holds both bitcoin and traditional securities.
According to the article, the next competition will focus not only on “who can trust bitcoin”, but who can take more institutional funds on security, insurance coverage and integrated service capacity. It is mentioned that, at present, only about 1 per cent of encrypted assets are covered by insurance at market value, a gap that has still not been actually filled by banks or encryption agencies.