Standard Chartered-owned crypto firm Zodia launches in Singapore
A view of the Standard Chartered bank in Singapore, May 3, 2023.
Caroline Chia | Reuters
Zodia Custody, a company that helps large institutions store their crypto, launched in Singapore on Tuesday in a bid to tap into the country’s rapidly growing digital asset market.
The development makes Zodia the first entity that is owned by and partnered with banks to provide digital asset custody services for financial institutions in Singapore, Zodia said in a news release.
Zodia is a subsidiary of Standard Chartered, the British bank with a presence largely in emerging markets, such as Asia, Africa and the Middle East. StanChart launched Zodia in 2021 alongside Northern Trust, in a move that highlighted curiosity from big institutions in interacting with digital currencies. Zodia is also part-owned by SBI Digital Asset Holdings, the crypto division of Japanese bank SBI. As part of that deal, SBI also agreed to launch its custody business in Japan.
Zodia said it wants to expand across Asia-Pacific to cater to growing demand from institutions for bank-grade custody of digital assets, as well as demand from existing clients in the region, the company said.
Singapore is “getting to that next level of maturity” in terms of forming rules for cryptoassets and the development of central bank digital currencies, Zodia CEO Julian Sawyer told CNBC in a phone call. Sawyer was previously a co-founder of Starling Bank.
“Singapore is a market that has been no stranger to the crypto world for a long time,” Sawyer said. “We want to be part of it. We think that the market of a bank owned custodian is actually what the market is wanting.”
Zodia works with clients ranging from hedge funds and high frequency traders to prime brokers, exchanges, and asset managers.
Standard Chartered has a “fantastic brand” in Singapore, Sawyer said, adding that the backing of such a large institution has helped boost its conversations with major financial firms. “Being part of Standard Chartered comes up in every single conversation,” he told CNBC. “It’s absolutely critical.”
“We adopt their risk their compliance frameworks, information security, resilience, [and] people managing,” he added.
Singapore has seen rapid growth when it comes to digital asset adoption. The city-state’s crypto ownership rate stands at 19%, according to market research firm Statista, higher than the global average of 15%.
Funding for crypto companies in Singapore has also remained strong despite a bear market the industry endured in the wake of the collapse of FTX, Three Arrows Capital, Terra, and various other previously prominent names.
Crypto or blockchain was the top area of fintech investment in Singapore in 2022, pulling in $1.2 billion of funding in 2022, according to KPMG’s Pulse of Fintech report for the second half of 2022. Crypto-related funding did still fall by 21%, however. Globally, crypto startups raised $23.1 billion in 2022, down 23% year-over-year.
Zodia’s move into Singapore comes on the heels of an expansion into Abu Dhabi. The company secured in-principle regulatory approval in Abu Dhabi earlier this month in a bid to take advantage of the United Arab Emirates capital’s crypto-friendly regulatory environment and status as a financial center.
WATCH: Coinbase ‘committed to India’ despite stopping new user sign ups on exchange: CNBC Crypto World
Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images
AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.
Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.
“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.
The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid.
“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.
AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.
Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event announcing new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2025.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy this week, leaving many economists and U.S. trade partners to question how the White House calculated its rates.
Trump’s plan established a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country, though many nations such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to much steeper rates. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump held up a poster board that outlined the tariffs that it claims are “charged” to the U.S., as well as the “discounted” reciprocal tariffs that America would implement in response.
Those reciprocal tariffs are mostly about half of what the Trump administration said each country has charged the U.S. The poster suggests China charges a tariff of 67%, for instance, and that the U.S. will implement a 34% reciprocal tariff in response.
However, a report from the Cato Institute suggests the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much different than the figures touted by the Trump administration. The report is based on trade-weighted average duty rates from the World Trade Organization in 2023, the most recent year available.
The Cato Institute says the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate from China was 3%. Similarly, the administration says the EU charges the U.S. a tariff of 39%, while the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 2.7%, according to the report.
In India, the Trump administration claims that a 52% tariff is charged against the U.S., but Cato found that the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 12%.
Many users on social media this week were quick to notice that the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. It’s an unusual approach, as it suggests that the U.S. factored in the trade deficit in goods but ignored trade in services.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative briefly explained its approach in a release, and stated that computing the combined effects of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in various countries “can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”
“If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said in the release.
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