In Brief
- Taurus has integrated ZIGChain into Taurus-PROTECT, enabling native custody of ZIG for banks, financial institutions and professional investors.
- ZIGChain is positioned as a Cosmos SDK-based Layer 1 focused on wealth-generation protocols and on-chain investment strategies.
- The companies are presenting the move as a step into Shariah-compliant blockchain infrastructure aimed at the global Islamic finance market.
Taurus, the Swiss digital-asset infrastructure provider working with banks including State Street and Deutsche Bank, said it has added support for ZIGChain on its Taurus-PROTECT custody platform, extending institutional access to a newer Layer 1 network built around on-chain wealth and investment products.
The move adds native custody for ZIG, ZIGChain’s token, and pushes Taurus further into the business of giving banks and professional investors one custody stack for a widening set of blockchain networks.
ZIGChain positions itself as a Cosmos SDK-based Layer 1 focused on “wealth-generation protocols,” with infrastructure meant to support delegated investment management and related on-chain strategies.
The network’s documentation says it is designed to let developers and wealth managers build and deploy investment products on a permissionless base layer, while Islamic Finance News reported last year that the chain launched its mainnet beta in June 2025 as a Shariah-compliant blockchain for tokenizing real-world assets.
The companies framed the integration as notable because ZIGChain is pitching itself as the first Layer 1 built specifically for Shariah-compliant institutional investment products.
Taurus said the addition means a European bank-grade custodian is now offering native support for that chain. That claim could not be independently verified from public records reviewed for this report, but the combination is unusual in a market where most institutional custody expansions still focus on larger general-purpose networks rather than chains built around Islamic-finance use cases.
“At Taurus, we are committed to giving financial institutions secure access to the digital asset ecosystem through infrastructure that remains both asset-agnostic and blockchain-agnostic,” Bashir Kazour, managing director at Taurus, said in the announcement. “With support for ZIGChain in Taurus-PROTECT, we continue to broaden the range of networks available to clients, while maintaining the high standards they expect from Taurus.”
The timing matters because custody has become one of the key bottlenecks in institutional digital-asset adoption. Banks and asset managers may be willing to experiment with tokenized funds, stablecoins and blockchain-based settlement, but they typically need regulated-style controls, governance and key management before offering access to clients. Taurus says its unified API now covers more than 30 blockchains, reflecting a broader industry shift toward multi-chain infrastructure rather than single-network exposure.
That strategy is already showing up elsewhere.
Taurus announced Solana support for custody, staking and tokenization in early 2025, and later became a strategic partner on Canton Network, underscoring how custodians are racing to cover both public and permissioned chains as tokenized-asset activity spreads.
In 2024, State Street chose Taurus to expand digital-asset custody and tokenization services, a sign that large incumbents increasingly want outside infrastructure rather than building everything in-house.
Rivals are moving in the same direction. In March, Anchorage Digital added support for Tron for U.S. institutional investors, while Standard Chartered set up a Luxembourg entity to offer digital-asset custody across the European Union.
Together, those moves suggest custody providers are widening network coverage and geographic reach as institutional demand shifts from simple bitcoin storage toward broader blockchain access.
The ZIGChain tie-up also lands as Islamic finance and tokenization are starting to overlap more visibly.
ZIGChain launched as a Shariah-compliant blockchain aimed at real-world asset tokenization, while White & Case said in 2025 that tokenized and fractionalized sukuk are beginning to reshape how Shariah-compliant capital is structured and distributed in Gulf markets.
Reuters separately reported this year that African sovereigns are increasingly turning to sukuk markets, and Standard Chartered launched Shariah-compliant versions of its CIO funds last year, pointing to steady demand for Islamic investment structures beyond traditional banking products.
That does not mean the Taurus integration will immediately transform the market. Specialized chains still face the harder task of attracting meaningful issuance, liquidity and regulated distribution, and custody support alone does not guarantee adoption. But it can remove a practical barrier for institutions that may want exposure without taking direct wallet or key-management risk, especially if those firms are exploring compliant digital products for investors in the Gulf, Southeast Asia or other Islamic-finance markets.
The broader signal is that institutional crypto infrastructure is becoming more segmented. Early custody was largely about safekeeping major tokens. The newer phase is about whether custodians can support the chains and asset types that banks may eventually use for tokenized funds, on-chain securities, compliant yield products and cross-border settlement.
Reuters has reported on that expansion across both custody and tokenization, from Taurus’s work with State Street to LSEG’s plan for a digital securities depository compatible with blockchain-based assets.
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