Jito Foundation and KODA team up for JitoSOL custody in Korea

Jito Foundation and Korean digital asset custodian KODA signed a memorandum of understanding to develop institutional custody and staking support for JitoSOL in South Korea, the organizations said in a Monday announcement. The agreement includes outreach to institutional investors and the development of compliant custody and staking pathways.

KODA will provide custody infrastructure including cold storage, multi-party computation key management and institutional staking services. The custodian carries $20 million in digital asset insurance coverage, holds a registered virtual asset service provider license and ISMS certification, and lists KB Kookmin Bank among its backers.

The agreement covers integrating KODA’s vaulting tools so custodial clients can mint JitoSOL directly from SOL holdings without moving assets out of the custodian’s vault.

Marc Liew, head of APAC at Jito Foundation, said the foundation is seeing interest from large financial firms aiming to build new wealth management products and from institutional entities that want JitoSOL’s yield for corporate treasuries.

Jito operates a liquid staking protocol on the Solana network. Users stake SOL and receive JitoSOL, a liquid token that can be used across decentralized finance while the underlying SOL remains staked. JitoSOL’s market capitalization is about $930 million. The token has institutional exposure in Europe through a 21Shares exchange-traded product, and custodians including BitGo and Hex Trust offer staking support from custody accounts.

The agreement comes as South Korea’s Financial Services Commission is expected to finalize a digital asset regulatory framework later this year. Regulators tightened licensing requirements for virtual asset service providers in January and proposed capping ownership stakes in domestic exchanges at 20% in March. A payout error at a domestic exchange earlier this year, when users received 620,000 bitcoin instead of 620,000 won, led to new reconciliation requirements between exchanges’ internal ledgers and on-chain balances.

Lawmakers are drafting rules to classify stablecoins as foreign exchange payment instruments and to require tokenized real-world assets to be backed by assets held in trust. The Bank of Korea has called for exchange-level circuit breakers and stronger internal controls at trading venues.