Fintech veteran Wojciech Kaszycki has identified three tests for real bank adoption of Bitcoin: client custody balances, credit-funded spot trades and its use as loan collateral, following Standard Chartered’s launch of deliverable BTC and ETH trading for eligible UAE institutions.

Standard Chartered has put Bitcoin trading on existing bank rails

Standard Chartered said on Sept. 3 that eligible institutions can trade deliverable Bitcoin and Ether through its Dubai International Financial Centre branch, making it the first global systemically important bank to offer institutional digital asset spot trading in the UAE.

The service supports BTC/USD and ETH/USD trades through the bank’s existing electronic channels, including interfaces already used for foreign exchange. Clients can choose where their assets settle, either using Standard Chartered’s UAE custody platform or another custodian.

As crypto.news previously reported, the bank introduced the UAE service more than a year after launching the same trading model through its UK branch in July 2025. Standard Chartered had already begun offering regulated digital asset custody in the UAE in September 2024, initially supporting Bitcoin and Ether with Brevan Howard Digital as its first client.

Wojciech Kaszycki, founder and chairman of Mobilum and a strategy advisor to Warsaw-listed BTCS S.A., told crypto.news that placing digital assets on a bank’s foreign exchange interface only removes one small obstacle for institutions.

According to Kaszycki, treasury teams care more about the identity of their counterparty, internal risk approval, custody standards, auditor acceptance, and the way each trade enters the company’s accounting system.

“Nobody on a treasury team ever says: ‘I’d buy bitcoin if only it looked like my EUR/USD ticket.”

A meaningful system, in his view, would connect Bitcoin trades to the credit lines, limits, confirmations, and back-office processes that institutions already use for currencies. Such integration would let a treasury department treat crypto as a regular balance-sheet item instead of running it as a separate project.

“If it’s just a new ticker in the GUI and everything behind it is manual, it’s a demo,” Kaszycki said.

Drawing on his work with a listed Bitcoin treasury company and a Dubai family office, he added that trading against a bank credit line without sending funds to a venue in advance would make it easier to secure board approval.

Bitcoin collateral would offer a clearer adoption test

Spot volume provides a poor measure of institutional adoption because trading activity can rise without showing whether companies or funds intend to hold digital assets, according to Kaszycki.

He instead pointed to custody balances held at banks for clients outside the crypto industry. Such balances would show that conventional companies, funds, and other institutions have chosen to hold Bitcoin through regulated banking relationships rather than merely trade it.

His second indicator is bank credit for spot purchases. Removing the need to prefund a trade would indicate that a bank’s risk department has assessed the asset, set exposure limits, and approved it within the institution’s credit framework.

Bitcoin entering bank lending books would provide the strongest signal, he said, especially if lenders disclose the haircuts applied to the collateral. A haircut reduces the value that a bank assigns to pledged property when calculating how much it will lend.

“When a bank has to price it, custody it, and liquidate it if needed, that’s adoption. Everything else is marketing,” Kaszycki said.

Banks in the United States have already started moving in this direction. An August report on JPMorgan collateral cited Bitcoin haircuts of 30% to 50%, meaning $1 million in pledged BTC could support between $500,000 and $700,000 in loan proceeds, depending on the borrower and loan terms.

According to the report, accepting Bitcoin as collateral also creates liquidation risk because a steep price decline could trigger margin calls and forced sales. Lenders therefore need rules for valuation, custody, collateral monitoring and liquidation before placing BTC alongside assets such as bonds, equities or gold.

Kaszycki also pointed to listed companies whose auditors approve Bitcoin holdings on their balance sheets. BTCS holds Bitcoin as a treasury asset on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, and he said the audit process requires more work than completing the trade itself.

Separate custody leaves a settlement problem

Allowing clients to use their preferred custodian offers flexibility, but Kaszycki said splitting execution and custody creates a familiar settlement risk. One party may need to transfer first, prefund the transaction, or use an escrow provider trusted by both sides.

Deliverable spot trading requires the buyer to receive the underlying Bitcoin or Ether rather than a cash-settled contract linked to its price. When the digital asset and cash travel through separate systems, completion of one leg can occur before the other.

Kaszycki compared the setup with foreign exchange settlement in 2005. In his assessment, Bitcoin can reach final settlement in under an hour at any time, while the dollar transfer may remain tied to SWIFT processing, bank opening hours, and payment cutoffs.

“The slow leg is fiat,” he said.

Tokenized bank deposits or regulated stablecoins could place the cash and asset legs on compatible systems, allowing payment-versus-payment settlement in which both transfers complete together, according to Kaszycki. Custodians would also need conditional release functions instead of waiting to confirm receipt of a wire before releasing the crypto.

For transactions between several banks, he said a netting network modeled on CLS could reduce the gross amounts that counterparties exchange bilaterally. Without such a system, banks must rely on credit lines, approved wallet lists, settlement windows, and staff monitoring blockchain explorers.

Standard Chartered has already tested ways to separate exchange activity from asset storage. Under a collateral-mirroring arrangement introduced by OKX in April 2025, institutions can keep eligible assets with the bank while their value appears in an exchange trading account. The framework later added BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized U.S. Treasury fund as eligible collateral in April 2026.

Banks could win regulated flows while exchanges retain liquidity

Large banks can capture more institutional crypto trading because corporate treasuries, investment funds, insurers and Gulf sovereign institutions often prefer counterparties that already support their compliance and credit requirements, Kaszycki said.

Clients may accept a higher spread in return for access to a bank’s balance sheet, documentation, and established relationship. Kaszycki expects banks to source prices from crypto-native markets before adding a spread for institutional customers.

Crypto exchanges would retain several advantages under such a structure. Their markets operate continuously, including weekends, while banks remain organized around business hours and existing staffing models. Native venues also offer more assets and deeper derivatives markets, where much of crypto price discovery still occurs.

“At BTCS, we already do most of our size OTC with market makers rather than on order books, exactly for settlement flexibility,” he said. “Banks are just the next step in that same logic.”

U.S. rules now give national banks room to participate in several parts of the process. A December 2025 report on OCC guidance explained that national banks may conduct matched crypto transactions as riskless principals, provided they offset the exposure and comply with trading, anti-money laundering and third-party risk controls.

Earlier OCC guidance also confirmed that national banks can provide crypto custody and execution or outsource those functions to qualified providers. Banks remain responsible for managing the risks created by sub-custodians and other outside firms.

An August review of the U.S. custody market found that BNY, State Street, Standard Chartered, U.S. Bank, and Citi had launched or were preparing direct digital asset custody services. The report linked increased bank participation to the SEC’s January 2025 withdrawal of Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 and OCC letters confirming banks’ custody authority.

Kaszycki said banks extending spot credit would show that their risk teams had built formal models for Bitcoin, while disclosed collateral haircuts would reveal how lenders value its volatility. On the corporate side, he would count listed companies whose auditors approve Bitcoin holdings, a process BTCS has already completed for its Warsaw-listed treasury.

BitMart has appointed restructuring and turnaround firm Alvarez & Marsal as its financial adviser, a move it said it made ahead of a self-imposed Sept. 9 update deadline. However, the exchange has not yet published the restructuring and business resumption roadmap it previously said it was preparing.

In its announcement Wednesday, BitMart said Alvarez & Marsal will coordinate with the exchange’s legal advisers to review BitMart’s assets, financial position, stakeholder issues, and potential routes forward. The review will also assess proposals submitted by third parties, though BitMart did not identify them.

Key takeaways

• BitMart named Alvarez & Marsal as financial adviser, but did not release an asset-and-recovery plan alongside the appointment.
• The review is expected to cover assets, finances, stakeholder issues, and third-party proposals—details investors and claimants are currently seeking.
• BitMart plans to launch a dedicated web portal within five working days to gather user feedback, with further updates rolling out over three weeks.
• Echo Base, an ad hoc committee of claimholders, praised the step but criticized the lack of concrete disclosures tied to recovery and withdrawals.

Advisor appointment comes without a published roadmap

BitMart’s Wednesday update framed the appointment as part of its effort to meet its own timetable for providing a clearer picture of what comes next. Yet readers looking for concrete information—such as an inventory of assets, a recovery estimate, or a customer withdrawal schedule—were left waiting.

Echo Base, which has been organizing an ad hoc committee of BitMart claimholders, characterized the decision as BitMart’s most encouraging move since July. Still, Echo Base’s CEO Roshan Dharia said the update amounted to “an advisor appointment and two new deadlines,” without accompanying disclosures that claimants have been requesting.

“What arrived was an advisor appointment and two new deadlines, with no reserve position, no asset inventory, no recovery estimate and no withdrawal timetable,” Roshan Dharia, CEO of Echo Base, told Cointelegraph.

What Alvarez & Marsal will assess

Under BitMart’s announcement, Alvarez & Marsal’s work will focus on evaluating BitMart’s situation from both a financial and strategic angle. According to the exchange, the adviser will partner with BitMart’s legal advisers to examine the company’s assets and financial position, consider stakeholder-related issues, and explore possible paths forward.

BitMart also said the process would consider proposals from unidentified third parties. For users and claimants, the practical implication is that the outcome may not be confined to a single restructuring approach; instead, it could incorporate alternatives submitted by external parties, pending the results of the adviser’s review.

The exchange did not provide additional detail on how quickly the assessment will translate into specific outcomes such as withdrawal prioritization, recovery targets, or a formal restructuring filing.

User feedback portal and rolling updates

In addition to the appointment, BitMart said it will create a dedicated web portal within five working days to collect user feedback on its action plan and future direction. BitMart indicated that updates on the feedback process and action plan would be delivered on a rolling basis over the following three weeks.

This signals an attempt to broaden input beyond claimholders and stakeholders already engaged with the exchange’s internal processes. But the sequence also raises the question of whether user feedback will directly inform the most critical next steps—such as timelines for access to funds—rather than serving as a consultative layer before detailed decisions are released.

Scrutiny since the July wind-down announcement

BitMart’s latest move comes after intense scrutiny of its financial position and handling of customer assets since it announced a wind-down on July 26. Coverage by Cointelegraph noted that users reported withdrawal delays following the wind-down announcement, which contributed to growing concern among traders, investors, and claimants.

Despite those mounting concerns, neither BitMart nor Alvarez & Marsal responded to Cointelegraph’s requests for comment on the story.

For market participants following the case, the key tension remains the gap between process updates and the operational information users need most—confirmation of reserves or asset inventory, an expectation for recovery, and an actionable withdrawal timetable. While appointing a well-known financial adviser can be part of a legitimate restructuring workflow, the credibility of that workflow depends on measurable progress and transparent disclosures, particularly when customer access to funds is at issue.

What to watch next

The immediate watch item is whether BitMart’s feedback portal and the announced rolling updates will culminate in concrete disclosures about assets, reserves, and timelines. With Alvarez & Marsal now involved, claimants and users should pay close attention to when the exchange moves from an assessment phase to publishing verifiable milestones—especially any withdrawal-related schedule or recovery estimate that addresses the concerns Echo Base highlighted.

Who is at risk of head lice?

How do you treat head lice? 

• Geely Sweden CEO Per Ansgar joins Concordium Foundation board.
• Concordium expands focus on verified AI agents and digital payments.
• Geely and Concordium deepen partnership on autonomous transactions.

Concordium Foundation has appointed Per Ansgar, chief executive officer of Geely Sweden Holdings AB, to its board, strengthening the blockchain platform’s relationship with the Geely group as it develops infrastructure for verified digital interactions and autonomous AI agents.

The appointment adds more than 26 years of automotive and financial experience to Concordium’s board.

Ansgar has held senior roles at Volvo Cars, Polestar and companies within the wider Geely group.

His appointment also extends a partnership between Concordium and Geely that began in 2021.

Concordium and Geely deepen five-year partnership

The relationship between Concordium and Geely began with a shared focus on autonomous driving and was formalised in 2022 through a joint venture based in Wuxi, China.

The partnership has also explored applications in which vehicles can interact directly with infrastructure and service providers through machine-initiated payments.

These applications include connected vehicles potentially settling charging, toll, and service payments without direct intervention from a driver.

Concordium is now expanding its focus toward infrastructure for verified digital interactions, including transactions involving AI agents.

As software becomes capable of initiating transactions independently, the company is developing systems intended to establish who owns and authorises an AI agent and who is accountable for its actions.

Ansgar said vehicles and the software embedded in them are increasingly becoming parties to transactions.

He added that trust now requires proof of who authorised a payment and who is responsible for it, describing this as the problem Concordium is addressing.

Ansgar brings automotive and financial experience

Ansgar has been CEO of Geely Sweden Holdings since November 2024, having previously served as the company’s chief financial officer.

Before joining Geely Sweden Holdings, he spent 26 years at Volvo Cars, where he held positions including deputy CFO and CFO of Volvo Cars China.

He later became chief financial officer of Polestar. Ansgar also holds board positions across the Geely group and serves on the nomination committee of Volvo Car AB.

His appointment brings senior Geely leadership into Concordium’s governance as the company works on infrastructure that connects verified humans and AI agents to transactions.

The Concordium Foundation Board is chaired by founder Lars Seier Christensen.

Other members include Ueli Maurer, professor of cryptography at ETH Zurich; Swiss commercial lawyer Simone Monnerat; and digital executive Nibras Stiebar-Bang.

Concordium expands AI agent infrastructure

Concordium’s focus is increasingly centered on establishing verifiable identities for AI agents that can act autonomously.

The company says its infrastructure is designed to allow counterparties to verify that an agent has been authorised by a verified human or organisation.

Its Agent Registry went live in May 2026 and has since registered more than 1,600 AI agents, according to the company. Each registered agent is linked to a verified owner and receives a Verified by Concordium Badge.

The badge can be used across networks including Ethereum and Solana, allowing AI agents to provide information about their owners without exposing the underlying company documents.

Concordium describes itself as an AI infrastructure platform for the agentic economy, built on a regulatory-grade blockchain with identity and trust incorporated into its protocol.

Ansgar’s appointment therefore comes as Concordium seeks to extend its earlier automotive-focused relationship with Geely into a broader model in which vehicles, software and AI agents can conduct transactions while remaining connected to identifiable and accountable owners.