Key Takeaways
- Bitcoin Rebounds Sharply. Bitcoin surged roughly 7% intraday, approaching the $70,000 mark, as President Trump’s pro-crypto remarks coincided with the U.S. Treasury’s expanded bond buyback program, fueling a broad rally across risk assets.
- Custody and Legal Authority Are Separate Issues. The U.S. government retains full legal authority over bitcoin it has seized, yet entrusts the actual safekeeping and transaction infrastructure to a professional institutional custodian rather than managing it in-house. Even an agency with formidable law-enforcement authority and resources chose outsourced custody over building its own infrastructure.
- Implications for Korea. As digital assets move further into mainstream institutional finance, the question of who safeguards them, and how, is emerging as a prerequisite that comes before how much to hold. The role of specialized digital-asset custodians looks set to grow in Korea as well.
Bitcoin’s 7% Rally Brings Relief to a Parched Market
Source: Binance – BTC, ETH (Aug. 21, 2026)
After a long stretch of sluggish trading, the crypto market finally caught a break.
Bitcoin rallied sharply in recent trading, climbing roughly 7% intraday to break through the $70,000 mark. Ether also topped $2,000, as strong buying swept across the broader crypto market.
Two factors drove this rally.
1. The Treasury’s Expanded Bond Buybacks Pull Down Market Rates
The first was the U.S. Treasury Department’s announcement that it would expand its long-end bond buyback program.
To support market liquidity, the Treasury said it would double the size of its buybacks for 10-to-20-year and 20-to-30-year bonds, from a maximum of $2 billion per operation to a minimum of $4 billion. Long-term Treasury yields fell quickly in response, raising expectations that broader financial conditions would ease.
When rates fall, the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets such as gold or bitcoin declines. Indeed, the dollar weakened following the Treasury’s announcement, while gold, bitcoin and other alternative and risk assets rallied in tandem.
Still, it would be a mistake to equate this move with the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing. The Treasury is not printing new money to buy bonds. It is expanding a buyback program aimed at improving liquidity in the existing long-term bond market. Even so, markets read the move as a positive signal for risk assets, since it demonstrated the government’s willingness to respond to rising long-term rates.
2. Trump’s Forceful Pro-Crypto Message Adds Fuel
Alongside the macroeconomic tailwind, President Trump hosted executives from Coinbase, Ripple, Robinhood, Kraken and other major crypto and financial firms at the White House, where he laid out the administration’s direction on digital-asset policy.
His core message broke down into three points.
① Pushing for Regulatory Clarity and U.S. Leadership in Digital Assets
Trump called on Congress to pass a fair version of the CLARITY Act, arguing that doing so would keep the U.S. ahead of China and other countries and open the door to the next wave of innovation. The CLARITY Act aims to clarify whether cryptocurrencies are classified as securities or commodities, and to define the respective roles of the SEC and CFTC.
② “Declaring an End to the War on Crypto”
Trump declared that his administration had “ended the war on crypto once and for all.” The remark went beyond politics. It reaffirmed a policy direction aimed at growing the crypto industry within the U.S. as a mainstream sector, rather than constraining it through regulation.
③ Framing Bitcoin as a US Strategic Asset
The U.S. is already pursuing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve policy built on bitcoin seized by the government, and that policy resurfaced at the White House event. What drew particular attention was the possibility that the government could acquire a significant amount of additional bitcoin going forward. Asked about this, Trump said such options had been discussed, and that he would weigh input from officials including SEC Chair Paul Atkins. No specific purchase size, timeline or method has been finalized, however, so it would be premature to read this as confirmation that the U.S. government will make additional bitcoin purchases.
Coming from a sitting president who has declared an end to the war on crypto and floated the possibility of additional government bitcoin purchases, this is hard to dismiss as political theater. It signals that digital assets are moving beyond speculative, regulatory gray-zone instruments and into the category of assets that governments and public companies are expected to hold and manage as part of mainstream finance.
That raises an obvious follow-up question. How does an entity handling assets on the scale of a national government actually keep its bitcoin safe?
How the US Government Safeguards Its Bitcoin
Not all of the bitcoin the U.S. government has seized or confiscated sits in wallets it controls directly.
The U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), an agency under the Department of Justice, is one of the bodies responsible for managing assets forfeited through federal law enforcement. In 2024, USMS selected Coinbase Prime as the provider to safeguard and trade the large-cap digital assets it manages centrally.
One point is worth flagging here. The Coinbase name might suggest this is simply an ancillary storage service run by the exchange, but that is not who the U.S. government actually entrusted its assets to. Custody is handled by Coinbase Custody Trust Company (CCTC), an independent trust company chartered under New York banking law. CCTC holds separate assets and books from the Coinbase exchange and operates as a Qualified Custodian. In other words, what the U.S. government chose was not an add-on service bundled with an exchange. It was a legally and structurally independent custody entity. That is not unique to Coinbase. Major global exchanges follow a similar principle: Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, OKX and Bybit each maintain some form of custody arrangement structurally separate from the exchange itself, particularly for institutional-grade asset segregation.
This points to a broader distinction. Legal authority over an asset and the mechanics of safekeeping it are two separate questions. USMS retains full legal ownership and disposal rights over the bitcoin it has seized. But rather than build the infrastructure to exercise that authority in-house, it chose to outsource custody and transaction operations to a vetted, professional custodian.
The fact that an agency with some of the most formidable law-enforcement authority and resources in the world opted for a professional custodian instead of building its own infrastructure is telling. It looks less like a question of capability and more like a broader pattern, in which the larger an entity’s digital-asset holdings, the more likely it is to separate custody into a dedicated, specialized function. Nasdaq-listed companies including SpaceX and Strategy show a similar pattern, relying on institutional custodians rather than self-managed wallets.
Why Institutions Choose Professional Custody Over Self-Custody
It is tempting to assume that holding an asset directly gives you more control and more security. But once holdings reach a certain scale, that assumption starts to break down.
Unlike a bank account, losing or having a private key stolen means losing the bitcoin itself. Managing a modest amount of bitcoin as an individual is an entirely different problem from a government or corporation managing hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars in digital assets.
Institutional custody services reduce the risk of relying on a single person or device to hold a private key, and apply institutional-grade security measures, including cold storage and multi-signature approvals. They also make it possible to build internal controls and audit trails documenting who moved which assets, when, and under what authority, while reducing operational risks such as an employee’s departure or a lost private key.
For institutions where accounting, auditing and compliance carry real weight, governments and public companies chief among them, simply keeping bitcoin safe is not enough. What is required is a system that can systematically control and demonstrate who has authority to move assets, and when. That is precisely why institutional custody matters.
Which Custodian Should Korean Institutions Choose?
The fact that the U.S. government and major global public companies rely on professional custodians carries real implications for the Korean market. As bitcoin and digital assets expand beyond individual investment portfolios into assets held by governments, financial institutions and public companies, the question of how much to hold becomes just as important as who holds it, and how safely.
For institutions that have not yet considered holding digital assets, it is easy to think this is not our issue yet. But the fact that even the U.S. government, among the world’s most conservative and tightly regulated organizations, is already handling this asset class, and doing so through professional outsourcing rather than in-house development, suggests there is little reason to delay preparation. For institutions already considering digital-asset holdings, the real question is which approach, self-managed wallets or outsourced professional custody, can actually meet audit, internal-control and compliance requirements.
As shown earlier, the custody arrangement the U.S. government chose was not an add-on service from an exchange, but a legally separate, dedicated trust entity. The same logic applies in Korea. Distinguishing between exchange-held accounts and dedicated custody services is an important consideration.
In South Korea, BDACS is widely recognized as one of the providers built to meet this kind of institutional-grade requirement. BDACS manages custody, asset transfers and stablecoin operations across multiple blockchains through a single policy and security layer, with an MPC (Multi-Party Computation)-based security architecture that governs transaction approvals, asset segregation and other operational controls. The company has also obtained SOC 1 Type 2 certification through a KPMG audit, and has built global interoperability through partnerships with firms including Galaxy Digital, Circle and Ripple.
Ultimately, the use of professional digital-asset custodians is likely to spread further in Korea, not just among government agencies, but across financial institutions and corporations generally. If the crypto market has, until now, revolved around exchanges where assets are bought and sold, the growing entry of institutional players suggests the next chapter will be defined by a different question: who safeguards and manages institutional assets. Custody infrastructure looks set to become a defining pillar of the digital-asset market.
