Crypto.com Secures Custody Deals with Axelar and Frax Amid Rising Institutional Demand

Crypto.com quietly picked up two meaningful partnerships this week, securing custody and liquidity roles for tokens from Axelar and Frax. Announced on Sept. 5 and Sept. 3, 2025, respectively, the deals are a clear sign that projects are increasingly choosing regulated, institutional-grade partners to hold and manage their tokens as they push for broader adoption.

On Sept. 5, Crypto.com said the Axelar Foundation will use Crypto.com Custody to safeguard AXL tokens, the assets Axelar uses for validator rewards, grants and other network operations. A few days earlier, Frax announced it had chosen Crypto.com to provide custody and liquidity support for FRAX and related assets on the Fraxtal chain. Both moves are practical: they let protocol teams offload the operational and compliance headaches of running custody themselves and make their tokens more palatable to institutional players.

Why would a project hand its treasury to a custodian? For one thing, institutions want certainty. Banks, asset managers, and large funds are much more likely to touch a token that sits in a compliant, insured custody solution than one stored in a self-custodied wallet with little accountability. Custody providers bring audited processes, insurance options, and tooling for things like staking and liquidity management, all things that matter when large sums are at stake.

For Axelar, getting AXL into an institutional custody environment helps the cross-chain network present itself as enterprise-ready. It smooths the path for tokenization efforts and for companies that want to interact with Axelar’s cross-chain infrastructure without taking on custody risk. For Frax, which runs stablecoin rails and an Ethereum-compatible Fraxtal chain, the arrangement lowers friction for fintechs and institutional clients wanting regulated exposure to FRAX and related instruments.

Strategic Collaborations

Crypto.com framed the agreements as part of its strategy to expand secure access to digital assets for larger clients. Axelar and Frax emphasized that trusted custody is a critical step toward deeper institutional engagement and ecosystem growth. In short, the deals are not headline-grabbing on their own, but they’re exactly the kind of infrastructure progress that makes institutional flows into crypto more likely.

What to watch next? Will other protocols follow suit? And will custody integrations like these actually translate into more predictable staking behavior, better liquidity, or bigger institutional treasury allocations? Those are the concrete changes that will determine whether this trend is merely administrative or genuinely game-changing.

Overall, Crypto.com’s custody wins with Axelar and Frax are small moves with outsized implications. They show that as crypto projects mature, many prefer to pair with regulated service providers to make their tokens usable and investable by institutional money.