By
Godfrey Benjamin
July 3rd, 2024
The offering by Abra Treasury will combine trading, borrowing, custody, and yield services. The development comes as there’s a growing demand among corporates to seek exposure to digital assets amid rising macro uncertainty
In a press release on Monday, July 1, the digital asset prime services and wealth management platform Abra announced the launch of Abra Treasury, which aims to provide crypto custodial services to corporates willing to hold crypto on their balance sheet.
The SEC-registered investment advisor Abra Capital Management will be operating this service. It will provide family offices, corporates, and non-profits with a range of digital asset treasury management solutions.
Interestingly, the offering by Abra Treasury will combine trading, borrowing, custody, and yield services. It will also provide a separately managed client account allowing them ownership and retain title over their digital assets, said the company.
The development comes as there’s a growing demand among corporates to seek exposure to digital assets amid rising macro uncertainty. Additionally, rising inflationary pressure and rising geopolitical tensions have also forced some corporate treasurers to consider adding Bitcoin as a reserve asset to their balance sheet. Speaking on the development, Marissa Kim, head of asset management at Abra Capital Management said:
“A sign of adoption and institutionalization of the digital asset industry has been the increase in non-crypto-native businesses showing interest in using bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset. We are increasingly seeing clients that are business owners and CEOs of small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), in particular real estate companies, with interest in buying BTC for their treasury or borrowing against BTC to finance business needs or real estate projects, which we did not see last cycle.”
Abra recently faced some regulatory challenges for operating its mobile application without proper licensing. As a result, Abra founder Bill Barhydt had to settle with 25 state financial regulators and pay a sum total of $82.1 million in crypto to US customers in the settling states.
Corporate Adoption of Crypto
In the US companies like MicroStrategy have already started adopting Bitcoin as part of the company’s reserves. Over the last four years, MicroStrategy has acquired a total of 226,331 Bitcoins.
However, companies across the world have been slowly considering a move in a similar direction. Over the last two months, Japanese public-listed firm Metaplanet has been buying Bitcoins as part of the company’s reserves. Earlier today, Metaplanet announced the acquisition of 200 million yen worth of BTC taking its Bitcoin holdings to more than 161.