The Wild West of cryptocurrency trading is getting something typically associated with the safest of savings accounts: FDIC protection.

SFOX, a prime dealer and trading system in the $208 billion crypto market, is partnering with New York-based M.Y. Safra Bank to offer its traders deposit accounts backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. — the same federal agency that protects bank customers up to $250,000 per financial institution.

It's the first time FDIC-insured accounts will be linked to a crypto prime dealer, according to SFOX, and allows traders to keep funds in accounts under their own names. Most banks don't allow their customers' accounts to be linked to cryptocurrency trading.

The FDIC insurance protects the cash leg of a crypto trade and doesn't apply to the Bitcoin, Ether or other digital assets SFOX users buy on the exchange. M.Y. Safra Bank sees "where digital currencies and crypto is going," said Danny Kim, head of growth for SFOX.

Beyond making funds more secure, the agreement "reduces the time required to make funds available for trading, making trading more efficient," said SFOX, which has about 175,000 users, from institutional investors to family offices.

The segregated accounts will protect traders by allowing them to hold their cash in their own name rather than mixed together in an omnibus account at an exchange, Kim said.

The crypto market, plagued with fraud, theft and regulatory infractions, has struggled to appeal to mainstream investors. Still, more of the traditional financial world is coming to digital assets.

Fidelity Investments, which began a custody service to store Bitcoin earlier this year, will buy and sell the world's most popular digital asset for institutional customers within a few weeks, a person familiar with the matter said this month. ETrade Financial Corp. and Robinhood are offering cryptocurrency trading, while JPMorgan Chase has developed the Quorum blockchain service for corporations and is experimenting with its own digital asset, JPM Coin.

"While we may be the first bank to provide these innovative services, we expect that we will be followed by many other banks," Jacob Safra, chief executive of M.Y. Safra Bank, said in an e-mail.

Bitcoin has more than doubled this year, extending the wild price swings that have attracted many individual investors to the mostly unregulated coin.

Leising writes for Bloomberg.