BNY Adds USDC to Institutional Custody Platform in Expanded Circle Partnership

BNY, the world's largest custodian bank, has made USDC the first stablecoin supported on its Digital Asset Custody platform, giving institutional clients a single environment to store, transfer, mint, and redeem Circle's dollar-pegged token alongside traditional assets.

The integration, announced Monday by Circle on its official X account, extends a relationship between the two firms that began in 2022, when Circle selected BNY as the primary custodian of USDC reserves. BNY oversees $59.4 trillion in assets under custody and administration, per its first-quarter 2026 earnings. USDC holds $73.71 billion in circulation, the second-largest stablecoin by market cap, per DefiLlama.

Custody-to-Mint in One Place

Under the expanded arrangement, BNY's institutional clients can hold USDC in digital asset custody wallets maintained by the bank, then instruct BNY to have Circle convert U.S. dollars into USDC (mint) or redeem USDC back into dollars (burn). That brings fiat cash management and blockchain-based settlement into one operational framework, removing the handoff between a traditional custodian and a separate stablecoin infrastructure provider.

BNY said it plans to extend the capability to additional stablecoin issuers and broader digital cash workflows over time.

GENIUS Act Opens the Door

The GENIUS Act, the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act signed by President Trump in July 2025, gave federally chartered depository institutions explicit authority to provide custody services for payment stablecoins. The law requires permitted stablecoin issuers to maintain 1:1 reserves in liquid assets including U.S. dollars and short-term Treasuries, and it allows OCC-regulated institutions to provide stablecoin custody within the existing supervisory framework without holding additional regulatory capital against the assets.

BNY's January 2026 tokenized-deposit launch was the first visible step in executing that strategy. The USDC custody expansion is the next: the January announcement put tokenized bank deposits on a private blockchain for collateral and margin workflows; Monday's move brings an external stablecoin issuer onto the same platform, opening USDC to BNY's institutional client base.

The bank said the Digital Assets platform is governed by established risk, compliance, and control frameworks and that client balances continue to be recorded on traditional systems to maintain regulatory and reporting integrity.

BNY's Digital Asset Arc

BNY's move into digital assets has followed a deliberate sequence. In November 2025, the bank launched the BNY Dreyfus Stablecoin Reserves Fund, a money-market vehicle designed to hold reserves for stablecoin issuers including Circle. In January 2026, it extended digital cash capabilities to institutional clients via tokenized deposits on a permissioned blockchain, with participants including Citadel Securities, Anchorage Digital, and ICE. Monday's USDC announcement follows as the third step: custody, plus the ability to mint and burn USDC directly from a BNY account.

Dante Disparte, Circle's chief strategy officer, said at the January 2026 tokenized-deposit launch that the BNY relationship has been "anchored by a shared vision" of demonstrating that "speed and new use cases do not come at the expense of safety and soundness expectations of the world's leading financial institutions," per BNY's announcement.

The expansion comes as Invesco filed for a GENIUS Act-compliant tokenized stablecoin-reserve money-market fund on June 25, and as Baillie Gifford launched a tokenized bond fund on Solana and Ethereum with BNY custody on June 23. BNY appears as the custodial layer across each of those institutional digital-asset moves.