Standard Chartered completed its first live digital-asset trades under a prime brokerage arrangement with LMAX Group on Wednesday in London. The pilot involved spot Bitcoin (XBT/USD) and Ether (XET/USD) with T+1 settlement, carried through the bank’s UK branch and closed through its digital-asset custody platform in the DIFC.
Standard Chartered Prime Brokerage acted as credit intermediary between counterparties on LMAX Digital, the group’s regulated institutional execution venue. The bank said the pilot validated infrastructure for trade booking, settlement, reporting, margin and risk management, and described it as its first digital-asset credit intermediation workflow.
“The lack of credit counterparties with robust balance sheets on the scale that we see in traditional finance has been a critical missing mechanism in the digital asset market to date,” said David Mercer, CEO of LMAX Group.
Bloomberg reported in January that Standard Chartered was preparing a crypto prime brokerage business. The bank said Wednesday’s pilot builds on digital-asset trading capability launched in 2025 and sits within a broader institutional stack that includes custody through its DIFC branch, SC Ventures-backed Zodia Markets and Libeara tokenisation solutions.
Standard Chartered said the trades put it among the first G-SIBs to test a bank-led prime brokerage setup for digital assets.
