Galanti BBVA Crypto, the digital asset subsidiary of Türkiye’s second-largest private bank, has extended its custodial partnership with Ripple.
Garanti BBVA will continue to use Ripple’s institutional-grade custody technology to secure key assets such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and XRP, according to a statement from Ripple Managing Director Reese Merrick.
From pilot to mass scale
Garanti BBVA Kripto was initially launched in late 2024 with a focus on a small audience of 14,000 early adopters.
“This update is a major vote of confidence in our collective vision for a secure and compliant digital asset infrastructure,” Merrick said.
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For Ripple, the deal builds on the success of its 2023 acquisition of storage company Metaco.
With its decision to combine Ripple’s custody software with IBM’s LinuxONE Hardware Security Module (HSM), Garanti BBVA is effectively betting that institutional “cold storage” is the only viable path to regulatory compliance in the G20 market.
long-term partnership
The relationship between Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) and Ripple is one of the oldest and most consistent partnerships in the enterprise blockchain space. It has already undergone nearly a decade of pilots, equity investments, and commercial deployments.
BBVA was already actively testing Ripple’s underlying technology in 2017. In April 2017, BBVA became the first European Tier-1 bank to complete a real money international transfer using Ripple’s distributed ledger technology (DLT).
In June 2021, BBVA Switzerland launched commercial Bitcoin trading and custody services for private banking customers.
Importantly, the bank selected Metaco, a Swiss-based custody provider, to build its ‘Harmonize’ orchestration platform. This choice laid the foundation for future relationships. Of course, Metaco later became Ripple’s “management department.”
In 2023, Galanti BBVA (Turkey Division) launched its own digital asset subsidiary, Galanti BBVA Crypto, to serve the high-inflation Turkish market where cryptocurrency adoption is rapidly increasing.
In October 2024, Garanti BBVA officially announced a three-way partnership with Ripple and IBM. With this deal, the bank now relies on Ripple (Metaco) for key management and governance, protected within IBM’s highly secure LinuxONE servers.
By September 2025, this partnership had expanded worldwide. Ripple announced that its parent group BBVA Spain will also integrate Ripple Custody.
