Garanti BBVA Kripto, the digital asset subsidiary of Turkey’s second-largest private bank, has extended its custody partnership with Ripple.
According to a statement from Ripple Managing Director Reece Merrick, Garanti BBVA will continue to use Ripple’s institutional-grade custody technology to secure major assets, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and XRP.
From pilot to mass scale
Garanti BBVA Kripto initially launched with a focus on a smaller cohort of 14,000 early adopters in late 2024.
“This renewal is a massive vote of confidence in our joint vision for secure, compliant digital asset infrastructure,” Merrick noted.
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For Ripple, the deal expands on the success of its 2023 acquisition of custody firm Metaco.
The decision to combine Ripple’s custody software with IBM’s LinuxONE hardware security modules (HSM), Garanti BBVA is effectively betting that institutional-grade “cold storage” is the only viable path to regulatory compliance in the G20 market.
A long-lasting 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 spanned nearly a decade of pilots, equity investments, and commercial rollouts.
BBVA was already actively testing Ripple’s underlying technology back in 2017. In April 2017, BBVA became the first Tier-1 European bank to complete a real-money international transfer using Ripple’s distributed ledger technology (DLT).
In June 2021, BBVA Switzerland launched a commercial Bitcoin trading and custody service for private banking clients.
Crucially, the bank selected Metaco, a Swiss-based custody provider, to build its “Harmonize” orchestration platform. This selection laid the groundwork for the future relationship. Of course, Metaco would later become the “custody arm” of Ripple.
In 2023, Garanti BBVA (the Turkish arm) launched its own digital asset subsidiary, Garanti BBVA Kripto, to serve the high-inflation Turkish market where crypto adoption was skyrocketing.
In October 2024, Garanti BBVA formally announced a tripartite partnership with Ripple and IBM. The deal saw the bank utilizing Ripple (Metaco) for key management and governance, secured inside IBM’s hyper-secure LinuxONE servers.
By September 2025, the partnership had gone global. Ripple announced that BBVA Spain, the parent group, would also integrate Ripple Custody.
