What Standard Chartered is Planning
Standard Chartered is quietly building a dedicated crypto prime brokerage inside SC Ventures, its innovation division. According to people familiar with the plans, there’s no official launch date yet, but the decision to house it outside the main investment bank is deliberate—it lets the team move fast while still tapping into the bank’s deep pockets and regulatory heft.
This isn’t Standard Chartered’s first rodeo in digital assets. SC Ventures has already taken a stake in Zodia Custody, launched Zodia Markets, and made history in July as the first globally systemically important bank to offer institutional spot crypto trading. Then in December, they announced something called Project 37C—a “light financing and markets platform” with custody, tokenization, and execution built in. Looking back, that project now feels like a trial run for the full prime brokerage service they’re preparing to roll out.
Prime brokerage essentially means bundling everything a professional trader needs: lending, collateral management, and access to multiple trading venues—all under one roof. Standard Chartered already does this for forex and equities. Now they want to do it for crypto. For hedge funds and corporations dipping into digital assets, dealing with a single, trusted counterparty cuts down on operational headaches and frees up capital. The bank is betting that by building this infrastructure early, they’ll lock in long-term client relationships before global regulators finalize the rules around crypto capital requirements.
The Broader Race Among Traditional Banks
Standard Chartered isn’t alone. Across Wall Street, legacy financial institutions are rethinking their stance on digital assets. JPMorgan is exploring custom crypto trading setups for select clients. Morgan Stanley has filed to launch spot Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana ETFs. And the numbers tell the story: U.S. spot crypto ETFs now hold roughly 140 billion dollars in assets—a figure that seemed impossible just a couple of years ago. As those assets grow, so does the demand for integrated services like financing, cross-margining, and securities lending. That’s exactly what prime brokers provide.
Why Prime Brokerage is the Missing Piece
Prime brokers are the plumbing of capital markets. They extend credit, consolidate settlement across exchanges, and deliver unified risk reporting. For institutional investors, these capabilities aren’t nice-to-haves—they’re deal-breakers before writing larger checks. Crypto-native players like FalconX and Hidden Road moved early to fill the void, and the market is already consolidating: Ripple bought Hidden Road for 1.25 billion dollars in April, and FalconX agreed to acquire 21Shares in October. By entering the arena, Standard Chartered is sending a clear message: traditional banks aren’t content to sit on the sidelines handling custody or payments. They want to compete head-to-head on the full suite of services.
A Stablecoin Experiment in Malaysia Rounds Out the Vision
Prime brokerage is only part of Standard Chartered’s crypto playbook. In Malaysia, the bank is partnering with Capital A—the company behind AirAsia—to test a ringgit-backed stablecoin. The project is running inside the country’s Digital Asset Innovation Hub, a regulatory sandbox designed to let new ideas breathe before going live. The goal is to enable on-chain settlements for low-cost airlines and small businesses operating across Southeast Asia. It’s still experimental, but it fits the same pattern: build foundational market infrastructure where none exists, then connect it back to traditional banking systems.
If Standard Chartered pulls this off, they’ll have a hand in nearly every layer of the digital-asset stack—custody, trading venues, prime services, and regional stablecoins. That combination of startup speed and big-bank credibility is rare. And as institutional money flows into crypto, it’s a combination that competitors are going to have a hard time ignoring.
