Crypto Custodian Aegis Trust Offers $25M Insurance Policy for NFTs

Crypto custodian Aegis Trust is offering an insurance policy for non-fungible tokens (NFT), the company said Tuesday.

The policy, provided by insurance marketplace Lloyd’s of London, will allow Aegis to insure up to $25 million for tokenized assets held by institutional investors, hedge funds and exchanges.

As the NFT market continues to ride out an extended crypto winter, digital asset insurance remains a topic of discussion. In March, insurance company IMA set up its office in Decentraland to offer protection for tokenized assets. And in the wake of crypto exchange FTX’s collapse, there appears to be heightened interest in keeping digital assets safe.

Serra Wei, CEO of Aegis Trust, told CoinDesk that lack of regulation and protection has led customers to lose their assets and prompted the company to roll out a custodial product targeting NFTs. Aegis currently offers a fully customizable white-label solution to build a complete custodial NFT Marketplace

“We are focusing on the security of the infrastructure. And that's really fundamental for institutions, which are still the majority of the value that has come into the crypto market,” Wei told CoinDesk. “Being able to put that layer on top of what we already offer to clients I think is critical.”

In August, the company teamed up with Coinbase Cloud to provide custody and staking for Evmos (the EVM hub launched on Cosmos) and Avalanche.

Over the past years, the company has continued to scale its asset custody and digitization offerings with regulation in mind. In December 2020, Aegis Trust obtained regulatory approval from the South Dakota Division of Banking to establish its trust. Institutional custody firms BitGo and Anchorage earned the status to operate in the same state.

Correction (22:02 UTC 11/28/22): Corrects description of Aegis services.