
Xapo CEO Seamus Rocca said the license added another plank to the firm's vision, which is much more about straightforward, long-term investing versus the sort of speculative trading strategies crypto is famous for.
Xapo began in 2013 with a wallet, a cold-storage storage vault and a reserve of 30,000 bitcoins, and has now established a branch in Gibraltar under its virtual asset service provider framework. Since beginning the process in 2019, Xapo has been granted a banking license, obtained Prime membership with Visa and Mastercard, as well as membership in SWIFT. The firm can therefore engage directly with correspondent banks, not through payment companies or third parties, and have access to money market accounts.
Banks are growing interest in Europe, driven to some degree by the MiCA regime, a market in Crypto assets. In 2017 Xapo turned away from institutional crypto adoption by selling its enterprise custody business to Coinbase, preferring to adhere to retail and bitcoin's ethos of financial freedom.
I think we were breaking the mold. We could see the need to build a bank that bridges crypto with day-to-day use cases because traditional banks didn't go to do it, Rocca said.
We've always been bitcoin-only, but so many people have asked us about Ethereum that we're adding Ethereum to the portfolio, he said. It will likely be possible in about a month to store Ethereum and buy and sell it at Xapo.