State Street and Taurus: A partnership in action

Zahid Mustafa (ZM): State Street’s collaboration with Taurus was instrumental in winning the digital asset partnership award due to several key achievements and strategic advantages:

1. Rapid infrastructure deployment: Within a year of signing the partnership, State Street successfully stood up foundational infrastructure with Taurus. This included setting up blockchain connectors and integrating hardware security modules (HSMs) for a private permissioned blockchain. This pace of execution was unprecedented and a significant technical milestone.

2. End-to-end capability enablement: Through the partnership, State Street can offer a broad spectrum of digital asset services. Taurus provided the underlying technology for tokenization, digital currencies (including tokenized deposits and stablecoins), and future connectivity to Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and other blockchain networks. This flexibility positions State Street to support a wide range of client needs across asset classes and blockchain types. Furthermore, we would connect to digital securities depositaries and third-party digital asset platforms enabling settlement of digital assets using different settlement methods (delivery versus payment, payment versus payment, etc.) that leverage the digital cash solutions mentioned above.

3. Strategic vision and open architecture: Taurus’s modular and interoperable architecture allows State Street to operate in both fully in-house and hybrid models. Whether State Street handles tokenization and custody directly or collaborates with third-party tokenizers and transfer agents, we can offer seamless integration and asset custody.

4. Future-proofing and market readiness: The collaboration lays the groundwork for State Street’s digital asset platform (DAP). Taurus is the “back end” powering this vision, enabling State Street to build a scalable and future-ready digital asset infrastructure.

5. Business use case enablement: This infrastructure is not just theoretical — it was designed to support real business use cases, including custody of tokenized funds and securities, digital transfer agency (TA) integration and digital cash settlement. This readiness to move from infrastructure to execution was a key differentiator.

In summary, the partnership empowers State Street to rapidly build a robust, flexible and forward-looking digital asset platform — positioning the firm as a leader in institutional digital finance.

Vassili Lavrov (VL): The collaboration with State Street has progressed significantly and has been a positive and strategic experience. Taurus has supported State Street in achieving a major milestone earlier in the year: the successful deployment of a production environment. This was made possible by extensive work on test environments and the completion of key ceremonies aligned with global security, compliance and audit requirements.

The core objective of the collaboration was to integrate Taurus Protect (a custody platform) and Taurus Capital (a tokenization platform) into State Street’s infrastructure, specifically connecting them to a Hyperledger Besu blockchain network. This integration is now live, and the first tokenization initiatives are actively being rolled out. As a result, State Street is now technologically equipped to issue financial products in tokenized form on its private blockchain.

The experience has been marked by close collaboration, strategic alignment and a shared commitment to innovation in tokenization and digital custody.

ZM: Yes, we are definitely moving closer to scalable digital custody and trading among mainstream financial institutions — and more quickly than we were a year ago. The shift is largely due to the growing recognition that a unified ledger isn’t necessary for progress. Instead, we’re seeing the emergence of multi-ledger ecosystems where assets and cash can reside on different platforms. What’s critical is the ability to synchronize these systems effectively.

Partnerships, like the one we have with Taurus, enable this. We also see increasing demand from clients who want to issue or invest in tokenized assets, and we’re building out agile teams to deliver on them. The industry is no longer in a wait-and-watch mode — we’re actively building and deploying solutions that will define the next phase of digital finance.

VL: From Taurus’s perspective, yes — we’ve seen a clear acceleration in the market over the past year. The abolition of Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 (SAB 121) and discussions around Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approvals for additional ETFs have significantly increased institutional interest in digital assets. This has, in turn, put pressure on banks to develop and launch digital custody offerings — both for tokenized assets and cryptocurrencies.
Compared to last year, there’s a noticeable shift from strategic planning to execution. We’ve received a growing number of requests for information (RFIs) and requests for proposal (RFPs) from organizations actively seeking partners to help them enter the space. While some are still one to two years behind State Street in terms of readiness, the momentum is clearly building.

State Street, for example, already has a live production environment and is preparing to execute on specific use cases. That’s a major leap forward. The focus now is on selecting the right opportunities and scaling them. So yes, we’re moving faster — and the industry is catching up.