Fintech veteran Wojciech Kaszycki has identified three tests for real bank adoption of Bitcoin: client custody balances, credit-funded spot trades and its use as loan collateral, following Standard Chartered’s launch of deliverable BTC and ETH trading for eligible UAE institutions.
Summary
- Standard Chartered now offers institutional BTC/USD and ETH/USD trading through its existing electronic channels.
- Kaszycki said bank credit lines, custody, and back-office integration matter more than a familiar trading screen.
- Bitcoin-backed loans with published collateral haircuts would show that banks can price and manage the asset’s risk.
- Crypto-native venues may retain their advantage in weekend liquidity, derivatives, and trading outside banking hours.
Standard Chartered has put Bitcoin trading on existing bank rails
Standard Chartered said on Sept. 3 that eligible institutions can trade deliverable Bitcoin and Ether through its Dubai International Financial Centre branch, making it the first global systemically important bank to offer institutional digital asset spot trading in the UAE.
The service supports BTC/USD and ETH/USD trades through the bank’s existing electronic channels, including interfaces already used for foreign exchange. Clients can choose where their assets settle, either using Standard Chartered’s UAE custody platform or another custodian.
As crypto.news previously reported, the bank introduced the UAE service more than a year after launching the same trading model through its UK branch in July 2025. Standard Chartered had already begun offering regulated digital asset custody in the UAE in September 2024, initially supporting Bitcoin and Ether with Brevan Howard Digital as its first client.
Wojciech Kaszycki, founder and chairman of Mobilum and a strategy advisor to Warsaw-listed BTCS S.A., told crypto.news that placing digital assets on a bank’s foreign exchange interface only removes one small obstacle for institutions.
According to Kaszycki, treasury teams care more about the identity of their counterparty, internal risk approval, custody standards, auditor acceptance, and the way each trade enters the company’s accounting system.
“Nobody on a treasury team ever says: ‘I’d buy bitcoin if only it looked like my EUR/USD ticket.”
A meaningful system, in his view, would connect Bitcoin trades to the credit lines, limits, confirmations, and back-office processes that institutions already use for currencies. Such integration would let a treasury department treat crypto as a regular balance-sheet item instead of running it as a separate project.
“If it’s just a new ticker in the GUI and everything behind it is manual, it’s a demo,” Kaszycki said.
Drawing on his work with a listed Bitcoin treasury company and a Dubai family office, he added that trading against a bank credit line without sending funds to a venue in advance would make it easier to secure board approval.
Bitcoin collateral would offer a clearer adoption test
Spot volume provides a poor measure of institutional adoption because trading activity can rise without showing whether companies or funds intend to hold digital assets, according to Kaszycki.
He instead pointed to custody balances held at banks for clients outside the crypto industry. Such balances would show that conventional companies, funds, and other institutions have chosen to hold Bitcoin through regulated banking relationships rather than merely trade it.
His second indicator is bank credit for spot purchases. Removing the need to prefund a trade would indicate that a bank’s risk department has assessed the asset, set exposure limits, and approved it within the institution’s credit framework.
Bitcoin entering bank lending books would provide the strongest signal, he said, especially if lenders disclose the haircuts applied to the collateral. A haircut reduces the value that a bank assigns to pledged property when calculating how much it will lend.
“When a bank has to price it, custody it, and liquidate it if needed, that’s adoption. Everything else is marketing,” Kaszycki said.
Banks in the United States have already started moving in this direction. An August report on JPMorgan collateral cited Bitcoin haircuts of 30% to 50%, meaning $1 million in pledged BTC could support between $500,000 and $700,000 in loan proceeds, depending on the borrower and loan terms.
According to the report, accepting Bitcoin as collateral also creates liquidation risk because a steep price decline could trigger margin calls and forced sales. Lenders therefore need rules for valuation, custody, collateral monitoring and liquidation before placing BTC alongside assets such as bonds, equities or gold.
Kaszycki also pointed to listed companies whose auditors approve Bitcoin holdings on their balance sheets. BTCS holds Bitcoin as a treasury asset on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, and he said the audit process requires more work than completing the trade itself.
Separate custody leaves a settlement problem
Allowing clients to use their preferred custodian offers flexibility, but Kaszycki said splitting execution and custody creates a familiar settlement risk. One party may need to transfer first, prefund the transaction, or use an escrow provider trusted by both sides.
Deliverable spot trading requires the buyer to receive the underlying Bitcoin or Ether rather than a cash-settled contract linked to its price. When the digital asset and cash travel through separate systems, completion of one leg can occur before the other.
Kaszycki compared the setup with foreign exchange settlement in 2005. In his assessment, Bitcoin can reach final settlement in under an hour at any time, while the dollar transfer may remain tied to SWIFT processing, bank opening hours, and payment cutoffs.
“The slow leg is fiat,” he said.
Tokenized bank deposits or regulated stablecoins could place the cash and asset legs on compatible systems, allowing payment-versus-payment settlement in which both transfers complete together, according to Kaszycki. Custodians would also need conditional release functions instead of waiting to confirm receipt of a wire before releasing the crypto.
For transactions between several banks, he said a netting network modeled on CLS could reduce the gross amounts that counterparties exchange bilaterally. Without such a system, banks must rely on credit lines, approved wallet lists, settlement windows, and staff monitoring blockchain explorers.
Standard Chartered has already tested ways to separate exchange activity from asset storage. Under a collateral-mirroring arrangement introduced by OKX in April 2025, institutions can keep eligible assets with the bank while their value appears in an exchange trading account. The framework later added BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized U.S. Treasury fund as eligible collateral in April 2026.
Banks could win regulated flows while exchanges retain liquidity
Large banks can capture more institutional crypto trading because corporate treasuries, investment funds, insurers and Gulf sovereign institutions often prefer counterparties that already support their compliance and credit requirements, Kaszycki said.
Clients may accept a higher spread in return for access to a bank’s balance sheet, documentation, and established relationship. Kaszycki expects banks to source prices from crypto-native markets before adding a spread for institutional customers.
Crypto exchanges would retain several advantages under such a structure. Their markets operate continuously, including weekends, while banks remain organized around business hours and existing staffing models. Native venues also offer more assets and deeper derivatives markets, where much of crypto price discovery still occurs.
“At BTCS, we already do most of our size OTC with market makers rather than on order books, exactly for settlement flexibility,” he said. “Banks are just the next step in that same logic.”
U.S. rules now give national banks room to participate in several parts of the process. A December 2025 report on OCC guidance explained that national banks may conduct matched crypto transactions as riskless principals, provided they offset the exposure and comply with trading, anti-money laundering and third-party risk controls.
Earlier OCC guidance also confirmed that national banks can provide crypto custody and execution or outsource those functions to qualified providers. Banks remain responsible for managing the risks created by sub-custodians and other outside firms.
An August review of the U.S. custody market found that BNY, State Street, Standard Chartered, U.S. Bank, and Citi had launched or were preparing direct digital asset custody services. The report linked increased bank participation to the SEC’s January 2025 withdrawal of Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 and OCC letters confirming banks’ custody authority.
Kaszycki said banks extending spot credit would show that their risk teams had built formal models for Bitcoin, while disclosed collateral haircuts would reveal how lenders value its volatility. On the corporate side, he would count listed companies whose auditors approve Bitcoin holdings, a process BTCS has already completed for its Warsaw-listed treasury.
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