Dutch lender ING has announced the spin-out of its digital asset technology platform Pyctor to UK-based capital market infrastructure company GMEX Group.
Pyctor was developed at ING’s innovation Labs in Amsterdam, with support from various financial institutions and regulators and is focused on custody of digital assets.
The platform enables institutional investors to store, manage, purchase and sell digital assets on behalf of their customers in a secure and regulated environment.
With the spin-off, Pyctor becomes a service offering within GMEX, and the latter’s chairman and CEO Hirander Misra will also be appointed as chairman of Pyctor.
Misra said: “Pyctor’s decentralized network of institutional participants and Multi-Party Computation (MPC) proprietary custody technology offering compliments and strengthens the breadth of GMEX’s MultiHub ‘global network of networks’ as part of our strategic ethos of stimulating growth in the digital assets market.
“With this acquisition, GMEX Group consolidates its position as the first platform to offer an end-to-end multi-asset, multi-sector Hybrid Finance (HyFi) solution that bridges the gap between off-chain Traditional Finance (TradFi) and on-chain Decentralized Finance (DeFi) across jurisdictions.”
ING said that custody services are essential for the digital assets market, in the same way as investors seek the safety of traditional assets such as stocks, bonds or cash.
Its Pyctor offers custody services that cover a wide range of digital assets, including cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens and other digital properties.
Together with GMEX’s post-trade digital market infrastructure platform, the solution will allow secure management and transaction of digital assets along with traditional assets.
Furthermore, the Dutch lender said that it will continue its relationship with Pyctor and collaborate through ING’s digital assets team.
ING innovation Labs and Fintechs global head Olivier Guillaumond said: “After spinning out Stemly last year from ING Labs Singapore, Pyctor has been another innovation success story at ING Neo.
“ING Labs incubated Pyctor leveraging ING’s DLT expertise, deep digital assets knowledge and continuous feedback from regulators and network participants.
“We now have found the right partner in GMEX to scale Pyctor to the next stage. It brings the ideal connectivity between multiple trading parties and digital assets custodians, while addressing interoperability issues experienced in the market.”
