BNY Taps Figment Validators for Institutional Staking Push

Bank of New York will run institutional staking on Figment's validator infrastructure, the bank confirmed, offering the service to eligible clients through its existing digital asset custody platform. Ether (ETH) comes first. Solana (SOL) follows. No launch date has been announced.

The deal pairs America's oldest bank with one of the largest independent staking infrastructure providers. Figment supplies the validators. BNY supplies the client relationships, the custody rails and the regulatory wrapper. For the bank's institutional base, staking stops being an off-balance-sheet workaround and becomes a feature inside an existing custody relationship.

Who gets access?

The service targets a deliberately narrow set of eligible clients:

• Asset managers
• ETF issuers
• Corporations
• Wealth management firms

Each of these groups has a different reason to care. ETF issuers, for instance, sit on large pools of otherwise idle Ether. Asset managers face client pressure to earn yield on positions they already hold. Corporations holding digital assets on their books gain a way to put them to work without leaving the custody perimeter.

Clients stake through BNY's custody service and earn rewards directly. The operational point matters as much as the yield. Assets stay within the bank's existing controls, and reward flows back to the same account structure.

What does this change for institutions?

It removes a structural excuse. Until now, an institution that wanted staking rewards typically had to move assets to a third-party staking provider or an exchange. That creates counterparty exposure, new custody questions and extra audit work. Folding staking into the custodian itself collapses those steps into one vendor relationship.

The sequencing also tells its own story. Figment's infrastructure supports dozens of networks, but BNY chose to open with Ether and follow with Solana. Those are the two assets where institutional demand and validator economics currently align. Ether staking is mature and deeply understood by compliance teams. Solana staking is newer for TradFi balance sheets, and its inclusion signals that banks now treat non-Ethereum proof-of-stake networks as institution-grade.

The bigger shift

This is a custody business evolving into a yield business. BNY already holds digital assets for institutional clients. Adding staking means the bank can now generate rewards on those holdings without the client moving a token. That deepens the custody relationship and raises the switching cost of leaving.

It also reflects where the institutional market has moved. Staking rewards on proof-of-stake networks are no longer viewed as speculative income but as an operational feature of holding the asset. Banks that cannot offer it risk losing mandates to those that can.

Figment, for its part, gains a marquee bank as a distribution channel. Infrastructure providers win when their validators sit behind household names in finance.

What happens next

Watch the launch calendar and the second phase. BNY has not committed to a date for the Ether rollout or the Solana expansion. When Solana support lands, it will mark one of the first times a major U.S. custody bank extends staking services beyond Ethereum — a benchmark other custodians will likely follow as institutional demand for multi-chain yield keeps building.