Revolut Wins Gibraltar Crypto Licence for Custody and Staking

Revolut’s Gibraltar permission covers custody and staking

Gibraltar’s government confirmed the permission under Part 7 of the Financial Services Act, listing virtual-asset order transmission and execution, custody and staking. Distributed ledger technology, or DLT, is the shared-record technology underlying blockchain services.

The GFSC’s register entry for RGDAL further specifies sending orders to third parties for execution and executing orders using the firm’s own virtual assets or money. It identifies a Gibraltar-incorporated private company, incorporated June 27, 2024.

These activities serve different parts of a customer’s transaction. Order handling concerns how a purchase or sale reaches execution. Custody concerns holding assets, while staking concerns committing eligible assets to support a blockchain network and potentially receive rewards.

Combining those permissions can support a broader product offering than an order-routing service alone. It does not establish which tokens will be supported, what fees customers will pay or whether every permitted activity will be offered at launch.

The development follows a different type of expansion at Revolut X, which added connections for AI-assisted crypto trading. That concerned trading tools. This announcement concerns the regulated business through which future services may be supplied.

Gibraltar onboarding resumes while rollout markets remain unnamed

The government also said Gibraltar residents could again open accounts in Revolut’s electronic-money and payments app after customer onboarding fully resumed. It described collaboration involving the company, the government and the GFSC.

That is a concrete local access change, separate from the international crypto plan. The statement does not establish that every newly permitted crypto function is already available to each Gibraltar resident.

Revolut says it already provides UK crypto services through Revolut Ltd and European Economic Area services through Revolut Digital Assets Europe Ltd under MiCA, the EU crypto framework. It has not announced that all existing users will transfer to the Gibraltar company.

For customers, the relevant question is therefore which entity provides their particular service. A common app and brand can sit above different legal agreements, product lists and eligibility requirements.

Revolut’s existing UK cryptocurrency terms illustrate that distinction: features can depend on geography or subscription plan. Those terms are not evidence of the final contract for customers served by RGDAL.

The same terms describe staking through validators and warn that network rules can impose periods during which assets cannot be sold, withdrawn or unstaked. They also make clear that the displayed reward rate is an estimate.

Those are existing product conditions to distinguish from a new authorisation. The Gibraltar announcement did not disclose its own staking asset list, lock-up schedule, rewards or pricing. An authorisation to provide staking should not be read as a promise of a particular return.

GFSC oversight adds market conduct obligations

The GFSC’s DLT market-integrity guidance sets expectations extending beyond obtaining permission. Firms must consider manipulation, insider trading and disclosures, with controls suited to the nature and scale of their business.

Its examples include monitoring deceptive trading activity and setting procedures to address conduct that undermines markets. The guidance distinguishes a trading-platform operator’s responsibilities from those of a business acting only as custodian.

It also addresses execution quality, timely access to client assets and communication about market downtime. These are ongoing operating questions rather than a one-time test of whether an app can begin accepting customers.

That makes the service terms and implementation consequential: the licence headline alone cannot show how a customer’s order is handled or when assets can be withdrawn.

Revolut’s UK staking guidance separately says rewards are not guaranteed and that slashing or downtime penalties can reduce a stake. Slashing means a blockchain penalty linked to validator conduct; the existence of regulatory permission does not remove that network risk.

The wider industry is similarly building services around specific permissions. Coinbase’s Abu Dhabi tokenization hub linked planned offerings to custody and investment-arranging authorisation, leaving operational rollout details as a separate question.

Alternative.me’s Bitcoin Fear & Greed Index stood at 55, or Greed, compared with 59 the previous day. It measures market sentiment rather than demand for Revolut’s services.

The next concrete development is Revolut’s promised disclosure of target regions and service rollouts. Until those details arrive, country eligibility, supported assets, customer terms and the scale of business routed through RGDAL remain open questions.