The first entity to operate from the relative safety of the Seychelles Financial Services Authority's 'regulatory sandbox' is now offering digital custody to the HNW marketplace.

The SECDEX Digital Custodian or SDC is the latest addition to the Seychelles-based SECDEX Group, which comprises a licensed, regulated exchange (offering traditional and digital assets), central counterparty clearing house (CCP) and central securities depository with a registry. The regulator's 'sandbox,' in which some of its development took place, is a scheme that relaxes some regulatory rules during the development and (as in this case) early commercial activity of a software product in exchange for the regulator learning about its operations and thereby gaining more knowledge of a market that it finds bewildering.

SDC claims that its 'onboarding' and 'legal process' are 'well-defined.' It offers investors safe custody for a broad range of digital assets, including security tokens and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. It makes efforts to prevent fraud and misappropriation, storing wallet keys and key backups with encryption. SDC services the needs of both private and institutional clients (including financial institutions), by handling custody, escrow services, automated transfers, balance confirmations and account-related requests.

In a short space of time, the SECDEX Group has already attracted US$544,718,948 of assets, which it has tokenised, "with immutability and transparency on the Ethereum blockchain and held in secure digital custody," in the words of its propaganda.

Jessica Naga, the Legal and Compliance Director for the whole SECDEX Group, said: “Operating as a regulated entity in the FSA sandbox enables SECDEX Digital Custodian to provide our digital custody solutions across borders,” which implies that the SFSA follows a policy of "no sandbox involvement, no foreign software promotions." She also thought that the fact that the FSA Sandbox is part of the Global Financial Innovation Network or GFIN, which consists of over 50 financial regulators and related organisations, was going to be of great help in attracting customers from all over the world.

SECDEX uses the GMEX Fusion hybrid centralised and blockchain distributed ledger technology suite, used by many financial institutions around the globe.