No institution moves into digital assets until it knows who will hold them and what happens to those assets if that custodian fails.

This panel looks at custody as the gating issue for institutional adoption in Malaysia, where licensing is in place but enforcement is still catching up with Hong Kong and Singapore. The panellists see banks entering the space as partners that grow the market, while tokenised assets raise a new test of whether the token matches the record behind it. On safety, they treat insurance as the last line of defence, with segregation and layered key controls doing most of the work.

Key takeaways:

• Banks and crypto-native custodians are…