FalconX Teams Up With Standard Chartered—Institutional Crypto Just Got a Luxury On-Ramp

Wall Street’s favorite crypto brokerage shakes hands with a 160-year-old banking giant. Game on.

FalconX—the Goldman Sachs of digital assets—just inked a deal with Standard Chartered to roll out institutional-grade crypto trading. Because nothing says ’serious money’ like a legacy bank suddenly pretending it always loved blockchain.

The partnership gives hedge funds and family offices direct access to FalconX’s liquidity pool while hiding behind Standard Chartered’s respectable façade. Because apparently, even in 2025, crypto still needs a traditional bank’s co-sign to look legit.

One-stop shop: Clients get custody, OTC trading, and—most importantly—a way to explain crypto investments to risk committees without triggering existential panic.

Meanwhile, in the fine print: Standard Chartered quietly hedges its bets by also shorting Bitcoin through its private wealth division. Banking never changes.

Standard Chartered Makes Several Predictions for This Year

A StanChart analyst last month predicted that the world’s largest crypto Bitcoin, would hit $120,000 by the second quarter. Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital assets at Standard Chartered, attributed the drive due to a “strategic asset reallocation away from US assets” and “accumulation by ‘whales’.”

However, he later predicted that $120,000 by the second quarter is “too low.” He cited Strategy’s (MSTR) increase in Bitcoin holdings, increasing institutional adoption, New Hampshire’s strategic Bitcoin Reserve bill, and several other factors as potential catalysts.

The bank has a year-end Bitcoin price target of $200,000. The world’s largest crypto was trading around $103,811 at publication time, per CoinMarketCap data.

Further, Standard Chartered has predicted the overall value of the crypto market to reach $10 trillion by 2026, and the stablecoin sector to surge 10-fold to $2 trillion in the next three years.

Institutional Investors Count on Crypto Bull Run

Standard Chartered launched a crypto collateral project in collaboration with OKX, creating a secure avenue for institutional traders to manage crypto-based positions.

The initiative was developed in collaboration with Franklin Templeton, allowing institutional clients to use cryptocurrencies and tokenized money market funds as collateral for trading activities. The program was introduced within the regulatory framework of the Dubai VIRTUAL Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA).

Standard Chartered is also exploring options to expand its crypto operations in the United States, along with Deutsche Bank.

The current wave of Optimism in the global financial markets is channeling capital into riskier assets, said Ruslan Lienkha, chief of markets at Web3 fintech platform YouHodler.

“Bitcoin continues to benefit from strong internal, long-term growth drivers, such as increasing institutional adoption,” he told Cryptonews.