Back from Singapore: what TOKEN2049 told us about institutional custody
This was The Vault’s first TOKEN2049 in Singapore, and it turned out to be a very clear reading of where institutional interest in digital assets now sits. The conversations our team had during the week were strikingly practical, focused on how to run digital assets safely, legally and at scale today. Here is what we brought home.
Institutions arrived with questions about “how”
The most striking thing about the week was the shape of the questions. People arrived with specific operational problems, often already budgeted and assigned to a team, and wanted to talk through implementation details: who signs, under which policy, on whose infrastructure, under which licence. That is how institutions behave when something has become part of normal operations, and for a first visit it was a very encouraging thing to hear.
After this year’s hacks, security starts with permissions
Almost every meeting touched on key management and access control, usually framed around one of this year’s major hacks. What interested people most was governance: who is able to move assets, who must approve, and what happens when someone inside the organisation makes a mistake or acts in bad faith. This is exactly why we build approval policies, spending limits and role-based controls directly into the signing flow, and why we let clients choose between running The Vault as managed SaaS or deploying it inside their own infrastructure.
Licensing has become a map, and businesses want a route across it
Payment firms and global businesses kept returning to the same practical question of how to operate across jurisdictions without building a full regulatory function in every market. In Europe, we can support eligible businesses through partnership arrangements within our group’s regulatory framework, with each case assessed individually and subject to the applicable requirements. Singapore also reminded us that Asia is its own map: the Blockchain Association Singapore forum at KPMG offered a useful overview of the frameworks shaping the region, and a reminder that governance and controls are the first thing institutions there examine as well.
Tokenisation’s open question is custody
If one topic dominated the week, it was custody for real-world assets and tokenised funds. Managers who have spent decades answering questions about segregation, authority and audit trails for traditional assets are now realising that the same questions apply to keys and wallets, and many of them are still working out who should hold what. Co-signing came up repeatedly here, because it allows asset managers and wealth managers to serve their clients and take part in signing without ever holding a full key.
The best conversations happened in the smaller rooms
For all the scale of the main conference, our most valuable hours were spent in more focused settings. The Digital Asset Yield Summit, where our CRO Bryn Bennett spoke on a panel, brought together asset managers, treasuries and payment teams who each had a clear problem to solve, and the executive dinner organised by Halborn gave us an evening of candid, unhurried conversation with people thinking seriously about the same questions we are. Our thanks go to everyone who joined us there.
We left Singapore with a long list of follow-ups and a clearer sense of what institutions now expect from their custody provider. If any of these themes sounds familiar, we would be glad to continue the conversation.