Interactive Brokers Adds ETH Staking as Banks Expand Crypto

Traditional finance keeps pushing deeper into crypto. Interactive Brokers — the brokerage giant overseeing more than $903 billion in client assets — has launched Ethereum staking for its clients, embedding crypto yield directly into a mainstream trading platform.

The move matters because staking has been the missing piece in institutional Ethereum products. Spot ETF shares give investors price exposure without the ability to put the asset to work securing the network. By offering staking inside a familiar brokerage account, Interactive Brokers closes part of that gap for clients who want yield without managing private keys.

Banks open the trading desks

Standard Chartered, meanwhile, has started offering direct Bitcoin and Ether trading to high-net-worth clients in the United Arab Emirates. Clients can buy and sell the two assets inside the bank’s own service framework rather than going through a crypto-native exchange — a notable step for one of the world’s largest emerging-market banks.

BNY Mellon added its own milestone, participating in a repo transaction collateralized with tokenized US Treasuries on a major tri-party platform — further evidence that tokenized real-world assets are moving from pilot projects into live institutional plumbing.

Why this wave is different

Each of these announcements points in the same direction: established financial institutions are no longer just watching crypto — they are wiring it into custody, trading, lending and collateral systems. The pattern echoes earlier adoption cycles, but the venue has shifted from offshore exchanges to regulated balance sheets.

For the market, the near-term price impact of any single announcement is usually small. The compounding effect is what counts: every new on-ramp lowers the friction for the next pool of institutional capital.

Source: myToken