Switzerland’s Sygnum Bank Gets Into DeFi

Switzerland’s Sygnum Bank is launching custody and trading across a range of decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens including aave, aragon, curve, maker, synthetix, uniswap and 1inch network. 

Sygnum, which has also added banking services for the USDC stablecoin, plans to expand with a suite of yield-generating products for its clients, which include banks, hedge funds, asset managers and family offices. 

“This is the next step on our journey to enable a variety of yield-generating products in the digital-asset space,” Thomas Eichenberger, Sygnum Bank's head of business units, said in a recent interview. “These can either be based on the proof-of stake protocol, so staking itself, or also leveraging and decentralized lending to generate yield for our clients, which is a bit further out on the roadmap.”

Banks and institutions are currently figuring out how to interact with DeFi, a $60 billion market of decentralized lending and trading mainly on Ethereum. On the digital-asset custody side, Sygnum leverages Custodigit, which involves Swiss tech provider METACO, a provider of digital asset safekeeping to banks like BBVA, Standard Chartered and GazpromBank Switzerland. 

"Sygnum's institutional-grade custody solution makes it easier for clients to onboard to the digital asset ecosystem,” Aave CEO Stani Kulechov said in a statement. “We look forward to continued collaboration with the aim of bridging the traditional banking world with decentralized finance.”