This article first appeared in Wealth, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on August 24, 2026 - August 30, 2026

CoKeeps, one of the three digital asset custodians licensed by the Securities Commission Malaysia (SC), has been quietly expanding its business and product suites over the past 2½ years with fresh funding from investors.

In an interview with Wealth, its CEO Suhanna Husein says the firm completed its seed funding round in the third quarter of last year without much fanfare and welcomed new investors on board.

While not disclosing the amount raised or the valuation of the start-up, she says notable investors that participated in the funding round include Etherscan, the locally based company behind the world’s most widely used “search engine” for the Ethereum blockchain that was founded by Matthew Tan in 2015.

Benjamin Teo, deputy chairman and executive director of Paramount Corp Bhd, also participated in the funding round as an individual investor. He is also the co-founder of Co-labs Coworking, among others, according to the company’s official website.

“We are today backed by a couple of investment bankers and strategic investors,” Suhanna says.

She adds that the start-up isn’t backed by any venture capital (VC) firm yet, as a digital asset custodian tends not to be seen as a high-growth, high-margin business. It is an infrastructure builder and provider that operates behind the scenes, hence attracting less attention from VC players.

Regardless, CoKeeps’ clientele has been expanding since it became the first company to secure a full licence as a digital asset custodian from the SC in November 2023.

Today, its clients include digital asset exchange MX Global and asset management firm Kenanga Investors Bhd, which launched the country’s first tokenised money market fund.

Other clients include equity crowdfunding and initial exchange offering (IEO) platform pitchIN; financial data and investment research platform operator EquitiesTracker Holdings Bhd; Maybank Trustee Bhd and AmanahRaya Trustees Bhd.

The firm’s first product is CoKeeps Wallet, an institutional-grade digital asset management tool utilising decentralised security and multi-party computation methodologies that remove single points of failure commonly found in storing digital assets. Its features include cold wallets, hot wallets with API access and smart contract solutions.

A hot wallet is like a cash register — always connected to the internet, and holding a small portion of crypto so withdrawals and trades can be processed instantly. This convenience makes it more vulnerable to hackers. A cold wallet is like a vault — offline and disconnected, with most of the crypto stored securely.

When the ratio of crypto assets in hot and cold wallets deviates from the regulator-specified threshold, CoKeeps’ solution automatically rebalances them.

Suhanna is targeting financial institutions as clients next, as banks start undertaking tokenisation initiatives.

On Aug 10, Maybank Singapore announced its participation in a series of tokenised settlement trials under the BLOOM initiative run by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Earlier in March, Maybank completed the first transaction under its inaugural pilot project for tokenised deposits and cross-border payments with Yinson Holdings Bhd, the global energy infrastructure company.

Meanwhile, CIMB Group Holdings Bhd announced its intention to test regulated digital asset payment and settlement use cases within a supervised and secure ecosystem.

Maybank and CIMB are involved in the tokenised sukuk programme by Khazanah Nasional Bhd, which forms part of the sovereign wealth fund’s Sukuk Danum Programme, an Islamic medium-term notes programme of up to RM20 billion, based on the shariah principle of Wakalah bi al-Istithmar. Both are participants of Bank Negara Malaysia’s Digital Asset Innovation Hub (DAIH).

Standard Chartered Malaysia Bhd and Capital A Bhd are also participants of the DAIH.

Tokenisation is going mainstream with the increased adoption by regulated financial institutions, underpinning the development and launch of CoKeeps Mint and CoKeeps Yakin, says Suhanna.

CoKeeps Mint, she explains, is a project management platform designed for financial institutions, helping different departments visualise and coordinate a tokenisation project before deploying it on a blockchain.

“The reason we built this was, when we talked to financial institutions, especially banks, we understood that they’ve already passed the ‘buy-in’ stage. The challenge now is how they bring things on the execution level.

“Financial institutions like banks have multiple departments. They have the management, operation, compliance and more. Tokenisation is something new to all of them. But now, they need to work on this together. A lot of collaboration is needed, which tends to prolong project delivery,” she says.

This is where CoKeeps Mint and Yakin come into play. Through a single platform, they cater mainly to five key areas of a financial institution, namely management, product, operation, compliance and shariah.

The platform can show each department the information it needs to manage tokenisation projects. When necessary, it can integrate financial data from various sources, such as foreign currency exchange rates or bond prices, into the platform for comparison or analysis.

Suhanna says the dashboard helps financial institutions visualise a project before officially deploying it on the blockchain. It allows for project management, monitoring, reporting and compliance, among others.

“Usually, only large financial institutions need all this data and most of it can be segregated into different systems. What we help do is actually put them in a visual management tool, by including the governance and compliance layer as well,” she says.

CoKeeps Yakin is a shariah monitoring platform, the result of a collaboration between CoKeeps and shariah advisory firm Amani Advisors, she adds.

“Right now, the issue is that shariah advisers tend to come in during the issuance [of tokenised securities]; they don’t really need to be involved post-issuance, but continuous monitoring is still needed. So, there is this challenge on ongoing monitoring that we collaborated with Amani Advisors to solve.”

Suhanna says the firm is already working with financial institutions, such as banks, on tokenisation projects, but declines to name them.

Suhanna is particularly proud of the fact that CoKeeps is a Malaysian company and its solutions are built entirely by local talent from the ground up.

“For us, thankfully, the products and services we offer to our clients, everything, is built in-house in Malaysia. We are one of the few digital asset custodians that have done this,” she says.

She believes data sovereignty is key in a deglobalising world and as such, has positioned CoKeeps to tap into this market.

“This is our USP (unique selling point) to our clients, especially the local players. Your data sovereignty is here. This is very important, especially when you’re a bank. We want to keep the Malaysian narrative as long as possible,” she says.

Suhanna is also proud to have Etherscan as an investor, as it is a global blockchain company that was born in Malaysia and, after years of expansion, remains registered in the country.

In addition, CoKeeps will maintain its role as an infrastructure player in supporting clients in the implementation of their digital asset and tokenisation projects.

“We like to call ourselves the guardian of digital assets, and that makes us focus more on building the infrastructure for the industry players, like building the railroads for the trains.

“We understand compliance, especially local compliance, which answers the question of why [don’t] local players engage a foreign digital asset custodian. Why come to us? We understand the SC’s and the central bank’s compliance structure,” she reasons.

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