EY Blockchain Custody Support & Verification Infrastructure

EY Blockchain provides comprehensive infrastructure and professional services to support institutional custody operations, enabling custody providers and enterprises to validate wallet structures, verify asset balances, and meet audit requirements for digital asset holdings.

Custody Infrastructure Support

Address Derivation for Custody Solutions: Derive blockchain wallet addresses from extended public keys, supporting custody solutions and wallet structure validation. The service provides programmatic address generation using BIP32 hierarchical deterministic wallet standards with full compatibility for industry-standard wallet implementations.

Wallet Management for Custody Providers: Organizations using hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets can derive child addresses from extended public keys and derivation paths without exposing private keys. This is critical for custody providers, exchanges, and enterprises managing large numbers of blockchain addresses. Specify custom derivation paths to organize addresses by business unit, customer, purpose, or other organizational structures.

Validation and Verification Capabilities: Verify wallet structure and confirm addresses belong to expected extended public keys, supporting audit and reconciliation processes. Derive addresses without exposing private keys or seed phrases, enabling safe address generation in less-secure environments.

Balance Verification and Reconciliation

Independent Asset Verification: Query blockchain networks to retrieve actual on-chain balances for specified addresses and time periods, then facilitate comparison with internal records to identify discrepancies. This is critical for organizations managing digital assets where balance accuracy directly impacts financial reporting and risk management.

Audit Support: Provide auditors and regulators with independently verifiable on-chain balance data that confirms internal record accuracy. The immutable nature of blockchain provides strong evidence for financial statement audits and regulatory examinations. EY's digital audit capabilities leverage blockchain technology expertise combined with traditional audit methodology.

Multi-Asset Balance Queries: Check balances across multiple cryptocurrencies and tokens on supported blockchain networks, including native tokens (ETH, MATIC) and ERC-20 token balances. Retrieve balance data as of specific block heights or timestamps, supporting historical reconciliation and audit requirements.

Enterprise Integration

API-Based Integration: Comprehensive APIs enable integration with accounting systems, treasury platforms, custody systems, or custom reconciliation tools. Automate balance verification and address derivation without manual blockchain queries or spreadsheet reconciliation.

24/7 Availability: The platform offers continuous availability, allowing flexibility to extract data and run scheduled jobs at any time. Includes an administrator console for managing API usage and external system integration capabilities.

Professional Audit Services

Digital Asset Audit Capabilities: EY's specialized financial statement audit services for organizations with significant blockchain and digital asset activities include independent verification of digital asset holdings using blockchain data, transaction validation, and controls assessment over digital asset custody.

Use Cases

Ideal for custody providers managing client wallet structures and validating client balances, cryptocurrency exchanges generating customer deposit addresses and reconciling holdings, enterprises organizing blockchain addresses by department, audit firms verifying client digital asset holdings, financial institutions with crypto custody activities requiring independent verification, and treasury departments confirming corporate crypto holdings for financial reporting.