The gold standard in digital asset custody

The digital asset custody market is experiencing significant growth. Globally, the market passed $683 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to at least $4.3 trillion by 2033, according to Grand View Research analysis. Against this backdrop, Absa has partnered with digital asset infrastructure provider Ripple to offer digital asset custody services to our clients in South Africa, enabling the safe and secure management of private keys that facilitate their participation in the digital asset ecosystem.

This will make Absa the first bank in Africa to bring this service to the market for corporate and investment banking clients. In Africa and beyond, the growth of the digital asset custody market is being driven by both custodial wallets (the space in which Absa operates) and non-custodial wallets (which are primarily driven by the retail market). As with all things – and particularly with new digital innovation – there is a degree of risk associated with both.

Individuals who choose to self-custody their assets hold their own private key or seed phrase. This offers autonomy, but at a high risk – as the story of James Howells proves. Howells is a British IT engineer who, in 2013, accidentally threw away a hard drive containing the only copy of his private key to 8 000 Bitcoin (now worth over $900 million). He has spent the past decade trying to retrieve that hard drive from a landfill in Wales, to no avail.

Howells’s plight underlines the industry maxim: “Not your keys, not your asset.”

For institutions, losing access to private keys is not just a personal loss; it represents operational, reputational, and regulatory risk for their business and clients. With digital assets moving from the retail space to the institutional arena, the conversation has now shifted from “who holds the keys” to “how are they governed?”. Institutions are now seeking bank-grade, auditable, policy-driven control frameworks that align with corporate governance and regulatory expectations.

When choosing a custodial wallet provider, it comes down to trust. You trust your bank with your money and your investments. Why would you not trust us with your digital assets?

No two custodial wallets are created equal; there is a spectrum of capability and trust in this space. At one end are unregulated entities; at the other end are banks like Absa, which provide a highly regulated, gold standard. This standard is secured by our reputation, our governance, our compliance, and the level of security we already provide for traditional financial products, which we overlay for digital assets.

In partnering with Ripple for the development of our solution, we have leveraged their software and capability in terms of broadcasting to blockchain networks, along with Absa’s own internal infrastructure. It’s not just about holding assets securely; it’s about embedding trust into every layer of the process, from technology and governance to recoverability and control.

We’ve designed our solution around resilience. Keys and authorisations are protected within secure hardware environments, ensuring that no single point of failure can ever compromise client assets. More importantly, recoverability is engineered into the model. To further enhance security, our solution uses deterministic key derivation rather than static key storage. This approach eliminates the need to persist private keys, instead deriving them securely when required.

In the unlikely event of system disruption or loss, cryptographic processes and layered governance ensure clients maintain continuity of access. This principle mirrors the standards that have long been applied in traditional finance.

From the bank’s perspective, this is a form of future-proofing. For our clients, it speaks to one of their greatest needs: security, and in an unlikely event, recoverability of their digital assets, backed by the financial strength of a regulated bank that stands behind its obligations.

We are delighted to partner with Ripple in providing this digital asset custody service, and we look forward to developing the solution further. The market is moving quickly, and as Absa, we see ourselves taking an iterative journey with our clients. We are starting with the fundamentals and will add capabilities according to our clients’ needs and as the regulatory environment evolves and matures. It's certainly an exciting space in which to be operating.