BNY Mellon Grabs Five-Year Bitcoin Custody Role on Invesco's ETF

BNY Mellon has locked in a five-year digital asset custody deal for the Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF. The agreement took effect November 6 and appeared in a November 12 SEC filing, according to Coinpaper. Under the terms, the Wall Street bank will set up segregated accounts to hold the fund's Bitcoin.

Coinbase isn't going anywhere. The filing states that Invesco's existing arrangement with Coinbase Custody Trust Company stays in place, so BTCO — the fund's ticker on Cboe BZX — can lean on both custodians. BNY's contract carries requirements covering safekeeping, insurance and standards of care, and it renews automatically for one year at a time unless either side gives notice or the deal ends early.

The shift goes beyond Bitcoin. Invesco Galaxy's Ethereum ETF, QETH, and its Solana ETF, QSOL, also signed digital asset custody agreements with BNY Mellon on the same November 6 date, with both filings preserving the Coinbase relationships. Until now, BNY handled cash custody for BTCO while Coinbase held the crypto, so the new pacts push the bank into safeguarding the underlying coins themselves.

Invesco hasn't said how much Bitcoin will land with BNY or whether any assets have already moved. The custody push follows BNY's recent institutional custody launch for XRP and RLUSD, and echoes Morgan Stanley's earlier pick of Coinbase and BNY for its Bitcoin investment product.

Nothing in the filings shows Coinbase losing customer assets or being pushed out as principal custodian — Coinbase's national trust charter took effect shortly before these agreements. Still, the paperwork adds BNY as a custodian of the actual cryptocurrencies, giving institutional clients another set of rails for managing custody exposure.