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The UK’s home for tokenised equity. Independent news, insight and resources for founders raising capital, investors deploying it, and the firms supporting both — as the regulation, infrastructure and opportunity converge.

Archax Expands UK Custody With Depository Interest Solution

  • Writer: Shawn Jhanji
    Shawn Jhanji
  • Jun 12
  • 3 min read
The headlines in tokenisation tend to reward the issuers and the funds. The quieter, more telling story usually sits in the custody layer, the unglamorous business of holding assets safely and keeping the share register straight. On 11 June, Archax, the FCA regulated exchange, broker and custodian, expanded its custody and transfer agent offering with two additions that matter more than they sound. An equity share registry, and a Depository Interest solution for securities issuers. Both were built on Avenir Registrars' framework, delivered by Archax with administrative support from Avenir.

The headlines in tokenisation tend to reward the issuers and the funds. The quieter, more telling story usually sits in the custody layer, the unglamorous business of holding assets safely and keeping the share register straight.


On 11 June, Archax, the FCA regulated exchange, broker and custodian, expanded its custody and transfer agent offering with two additions that matter more than they sound. An equity share registry, and a Depository Interest solution for securities issuers. Both were built on Avenir Registrars' framework, delivered by Archax with administrative support from Avenir.


A Depository Interest lets the shares of an overseas company trade on a UK venue and settle inside the Euroclear UK and International system, CREST. In plain terms, it gives an overseas issuer a clean route into the UK capital market without having to restructure itself to do so. Archax already offered transfer agency to fund managers. Adding an equity registry extends that capability from funds to companies, which is a meaningful widening of who it can serve.


To see why this counts, look at the custody story that has been building for months. When a US firm won approval to custody tokenised securities, it was treated as a landmark, and rightly so. Custody is the gate that everything institutional has to pass through. You cannot have orderly markets in an asset that no regulated party will reliably hold. Archax doing registry and Depository Interest work is the UK assembling the same foundational layer from a different direction. It connects traditional settlement rails, CREST and Euroclear, to a regulated operator that also lives in the digital asset world.


That dual position is the interesting part. Archax is a regulated cryptoasset exchange and a CREST connected custodian at the same time. It sits in both worlds at once. That is precisely what convergence looks like when it stops being a conference slide and becomes an actual service an issuer can buy. The traditional plumbing and the new plumbing meeting in one regulated entity, rather than shouting at each other across a gap.


For a founder thinking years ahead about liquidity, the relevance is foundational rather than flashy. Custody and a clean, accurate share register are the boring prerequisites that make everything else possible. You cannot run orderly secondary trading, PISCES style trading windows or tokenised equity without someone dependable holding the asset and maintaining the record of who owns what. The visible parts of this market, the trading venues and the onchain issuance, all rest on that layer working quietly underneath. The UK steadily building it is a precondition for the more eye catching developments to function at all.


None of this will trend on a Tuesday. But infrastructure rarely does, and that is the point. The market that founders will eventually use to raise and to offer liquidity is being assembled one unglamorous capability at a time, and a custodian that can hold both an overseas company's shares and a tokenised security is a genuinely useful brick in that wall.


Key Takeaways

  • Archax has expanded its custody and transfer agent offering with an equity share registry and a Depository Interest solution, built on Avenir Registrars' framework.

  • A Depository Interest lets an overseas company's shares trade on a UK venue and settle within Euroclear UK and International's CREST system, opening a route into the UK capital market.

  • The move extends Archax's transfer agency from funds to companies, and pairs traditional settlement rails with a regulated digital asset operator.

  • Custody and an accurate share register are the foundational layer beneath secondary trading, PISCES windows and tokenised equity, the UK is quietly building it out.

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