The Swiss bank Sygnum Bank, which focuses on cryptocurrencies, has announced that it will be the first bank in the world to allow its customers to invest ether.

According to a blog post dated July 6, the company’s customers can now use ETH through Sygnum’s institutional banking platform for an annualized return of up to 7%.

Sygnum describes itself as “the world’s first digital asset bank”, holding a banking license in Switzerland and a capital market services license in Singapore in August 2019 and October 2019, respectively.

The company claims that “the majority of decentralized products and services run on Ethereum” and notes that the Total Value Locked (TVL) of the DeFi sector has more than tripled since early 2021:

“Since Ethereum supports the exponential growth of decentralized financial applications (DeFi), staking is an attractive option for long-term Ethereum investors who are also looking for attractive returns.”

Thomas Eichenberger, Managing Director at Sygnum, described the Ethereum staking as “a core element of the digital asset portfolio”.

Sygnum started its staking service for Tezos (XTZ) in November 2020 and has been offering a fixed-term deposit product for its digital Swiss franc Stablecoin DCHF since March.

The bank faces competition from many crypto-native staking providers and centralized exchanges, including leading US companies Coinbase and Kraken.

Digital Asset Bank also wants to support DeFi Assets and last month launched managed banking services for eight top tokens including UNI, MKR and CRV.

According to Staking Rewards, Eth2 is currently the second largest proof-of-stake network by staking out a capitalization of $ 13.5 billion, even though only 5% of circulating Ethers are currently blocked from staking.

Cardano (ADA) has the largest share cap at $ 31.8 billion and 70.7% of the offering is currently on hold.