In July, Temasek's Nagi Hamiyeh said the fund was not putting money into crypto. Temasek wrote off its entire $275 million FTX investment in 2022 and cut staff pay over it the following year. Nobody there has forgotten.
The direct book may be clean. The rest of the portfolio is a different picture.
At Money20/20 in Las Vegas last month, two Temasek holdings had people on stage. Neither said the word Temasek.
Standard Chartered
Temasek is Standard Chartered's largest shareholder. It raised its stake to about 18% in March, mostly held through its Dover Investments subsidiary. It has been the bank's top holder since 2006.
On October 8, Standard Chartered said it plans to offer crypto custody in Singapore before the end of the year, for institutional and accredited clients. It will cover selected cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, and it still needs regulatory clearance. The bank's Singapore, ASEAN and South Asia CEO, Patrick Lee, and its global head of transaction services and digital assets, Ole Matthiessen, made the announcement.
This is not the bank's first step. Its SC Ventures arm started Zodia Custody, the institutional crypto custodian.
Standard Chartered's US and Americas CEO, Mandy DeFilippo, sat on the geopolitics panel on October 20. She came to the bank in March 2025 from Citadel Securities, where she was managing director and chief operating officer, after senior risk and capital markets roles at Morgan Stanley. Her point on stage was that clients care about speed and liquidity, not which form of digital money wins, and that the bank's job is to connect them.
That is a reasonable description of a custody business.
Standard Chartered's workforce is shrinking where custody needs it
Standard Chartered has been getting smaller all year, slipping in almost every month from January through October.