the business case for a blockchain strategy and
the technological foundations that make that strategy a reality.
This guide aims to address these questions. It is not a comprehensive survey of every use case or protocol, but rather a zero-to-one guide that identifies key early options, shares emerging models, and helps establish blockchain as core infrastructure, not just token hype—one that, if implemented correctly, can future-proof traditional financial institutions and unlock new sources of growth. Because banks, asset managers, and fintech companies (including the increasingly popular PayFi) differ in how they interact with end users, their legacy infrastructure limitations, and their regulatory requirements, we've organized the following sections to provide leaders in these industries with a solid, practical understanding of how blockchain can be applied in their worlds and how to move from a blank slate to working products. Banks may appear modern, but the software they run is ancient—primarily COBOL, a programming language from the 1960s. This ancient language underpins systems that comply with banking regulations. When customers click on a sleek webpage or tap on a mobile app, these front-ends simply translate their clicks into instructions for a decades-old COBOL program. Blockchain can be a way to upgrade these systems without compromising regulatory integrity. By integrating and building on blockchain, banks can move away from the internet's "bookstore with a website" era and toward a model more like Amazon: one with a modern database and improved interoperability standards. Tokenized assets—whether stablecoins, deposits, or securities—are likely to play a central role in future capital markets. Putting the right systems in place to avoid being displaced by this shift is just the starting point. Banks must truly own this transformation. On the retail side, banks are exploring ways to expose clients to Bitcoin and other digital assets through their affiliated brokers, thereby introducing cryptocurrencies as part of the overall customer experience. This exposure can occur indirectly through exchange-traded products (ETPs) or, eventually, directly following the repeal of SEC accounting rule SAB 121 (which effectively prevented US banks from engaging in digital custody). But on the institutional/back-office side, the opportunities and utility are even greater, with three emerging use cases emerging: tokenized deposits, settlement infrastructure, and collateral liquidity. Tokenized deposits represent a fundamental shift in how commercial banks manage and operate their funds. Tokenized deposits are not a speculative concept; they are already being implemented, as exemplified by JPMorgan Chase's JPMD token and Citi's Token Services for Cash. These are not synthetic stablecoins or digital assets backed by government bonds—they are backed by real fiat currency, held in commercial bank accounts, and redeemable 1:1 for regulated tokens that can be traded across private and public blockchains (see below). Tokenized deposits can reduce settlement latency for cross-border payments, treasury management, trade finance, and other transactions from days to minutes or even seconds. Banks will benefit from lower operating costs, reduced reconciliation costs, and greater capital efficiency. Banks are also actively reassessing their settlement infrastructure. Some tier-one banks are participating in distributed ledger settlement trials—often in partnership with central banks or blockchain-native participants—to address the inefficiencies of the "T+2" system. For example, Matter Labs, the parent company of zkSync (an Ethereum second layer, or L2, which optimizes Ethereum performance through off-chain transaction processing), is collaborating with global banks to demonstrate near-real-time settlement in the cross-border payments and intraday repurchase agreement (repo) markets. The business impacts include increased capital efficiency, improved liquidity utilization, and reduced operational overhead. Blockchain and tokens can also enhance banks' ability to quickly and efficiently transfer assets across business units, geographies, and counterparties—a practice known as collateral liquidity. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which provides clearing, settlement, and custody services in traditional US markets, recently launched a Smart Net Asset Value pilot, aiming to modernize collateral liquidity by tokenizing net asset value data. This pilot demonstrates how collateral can behave more like liquid, programmable money—not only an operational upgrade for banks but also supporting their broader strategy. Improved collateral liquidity enables banks to reduce capital buffers, access broader liquidity pools, and compete more aggressively in the capital markets with leaner balance sheets. For all of these use cases—tokenized deposits, settlement infrastructure, and collateral liquidity—banks must make key decisions, starting with whether to use a private/permissioned blockchain or a public blockchain network. While banks were previously prohibited from accessing public blockchain networks, recent guidance from banking regulators, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), has opened up the possibility for banks to connect to them. This is highlighted by collaborations like R3's Corda integration with Solana. This partnership will enable permissioned networks on Corda to settle assets directly onto Solana. Using tokenized deposits as a use case, we will discuss early options for bringing a product to market, including blockchain selection and level of decentralization. While there are many options for choosing a blockchain, building a product on a decentralized public blockchain offers numerous advantages. It provides a neutral developer platform to which anyone can contribute, increasing trust and expanding the ecosystem supporting your product. Because anyone can contribute, product iteration is accelerated through the ability to use, adapt, and combine others' building blocks (also known as composability). It also strengthens trust in the platform. The best developers are most interested in building on decentralized blockchains whose rules can't change suddenly, as this ensures their products remain profitable. In contrast, highly centralized public blockchains (whose owners can change the rules or censor certain applications) and non-programmable blockchains don't benefit from composability. While blockchains are currently slower than centralized internet services, their performance has improved significantly over the past few years. Layer 2 rollups (various types of off-chain scaling solutions) on Ethereum, such as Coinbase's Base, and faster Layer 1 (L1) blockchains like Aptos, Solana, and Sui, can already send transactions for less than a cent with sub-second latency. Banks must also consider the appropriate level of decentralization based on their specific use cases. The Ethereum blockchain protocol and community prioritize ensuring that anyone on the planet can independently verify every transaction on the chain. Meanwhile, Solana relaxes this requirement by increasing the hardware required for validation, while also significantly improving the chain's performance. Even in the public blockchain space, banks should consider the extent of centralization. For example, if the total number of validators in a network is relatively small, but the network's foundation controls a relatively large proportion of validators, the chain will be subject to significant centralization, making it less decentralized than it appears. Similarly, if entities associated with a public chain (such as a foundation or a lab entity) hold a large number of tokens, they may use these tokens to influence or control decisions regarding the network. Privacy Considerations: Privacy and confidentiality are key considerations in any banking transaction, partly due to legal requirements. The rise and use of zero-knowledge proofs can help protect sensitive financial data, even on public chains. These systems work by proving they possess specific information an institution needs without revealing the information itself—for example, one can prove that someone is over 21, but not their date or place of birth. Zero-knowledge-based protocols, such as zkSync, can be used to enable private on-chain transactions. To maintain compliance, banks also need the ability to review and revert transactions as needed. This is where a "view key" (developed by Aleo, a secret L1 key) can ensure privacy while still allowing regulators and auditors to view transactions as needed. Solana's token extensions provide compliance features that allow for confidentiality. Avalanche's Layer 1 has unique capabilities for enforcing any verification logic that can be encoded in a smart contract. Many of these properties also apply to stablecoins. As one of the most popular blockchain applications today, stablecoins have become one of the cheapest ways to transfer US dollars. In addition to lowering fees, they offer permissionless programmability and scalability—so anyone can use stablecoin rails to integrate globally accessible, fast money into their products while building new fintech capabilities. Following the GENIUS Act, banks need transparency into stablecoin transactions and reserves. Companies like Bastion and Anchorage have achieved this transparency.
When considering a custody strategy (i.e., who will manage and store crypto assets), most banks choose to work with a partner rather than custody crypto themselves. Some custodian banks, such as State Street, are exploring offering their own cryptocurrency custody services. However, if working with a custodian, banks should consider its licensing and certifications, security posture, and other operational practices. In terms of licensing and certifications, custodians should adhere to regulatory frameworks, such as bank or trust licenses (federal or state), virtual currency business licenses, state exchange licenses, and certifications such as SOC 2 compliance. For example, Coinbase operates its custody business through a New York trust license, Fidelity operates its custody business through Fidelity Digital Asset Services, and Anchorage operates its custody business through a federal OCC license. To ensure security, custodians should also have strong cryptography; hardware security modules (HSMs) to prevent unauthorized access, extraction, or tampering; and multi-party computation (MPC) processes to distribute private keys across multiple parties for increased security. These measures help prevent hacking attacks and operational failures. Custodians should also adopt other operational best practices, including asset segregation to ensure customer assets are protected in the event of bankruptcy; transparent proof of reserves mechanisms to enable users and regulators to verify that reserves match liabilities; and regular third-party audits to detect fraud, errors, or security breaches. For example, Anchorage uses biometric multi-factor authentication and geographically distributed key sharding to strengthen governance. Finally, custodians should have clear disaster recovery plans in place to ensure business continuity. What role do wallets play in custody decisions? Banks are increasingly recognizing that integrating crypto wallets is a strategic imperative to remain competitive with neobanks and ancillary service providers like centralized exchanges. For institutional clients (such as hedge funds, asset managers, or corporations), wallets are positioned as enterprise-grade custody, trading, and settlement tools. For retail clients (such as small businesses or individuals), wallets are largely confused as an embedded feature for accessing digital assets. In both cases, wallets are more than simple storage solutions; they enable secure and compliant access to assets such as stablecoins or tokenized treasury bonds through private keys. "Hosted wallets" and "self-custodial wallets" represent two extremes in terms of control, security, and responsibility. Custodial wallets are managed by a third-party service provider that holds keys on the user's behalf, while users manage their own keys with self-custodial wallets. Understanding the difference between the two is crucial for banks, as they need to meet a wide range of needs—from the highly compliant demands of institutional clients, to the desire for autonomy among sophisticated clients, to the convenience preferences of mainstream retail investors. Custodial providers like Coinbase and Anchorage have integrated wallet products to meet the needs of institutional clients, while companies like Dynamic and Phantom offer complementary products to help modernize banking applications. Asset Managers: For asset managers, blockchain can expand distribution, automate fund operations, and leverage on-chain liquidity. Tokenized funds and real-world assets (RWAs) offer new packaging that makes asset management products more accessible and combinable—especially for a global investor base that increasingly craves 24/7 access, instant settlement, and programmable trading. At the same time, on-chain operations can significantly streamline back-office workflows, from net asset value calculations to cap table management. The result? Lower costs, faster time to market, and a more differentiated product suite—advantages that continue to compound in a competitive market. Asset managers are constantly striving to improve the distribution and liquidity of products that can most quickly attract funds from digitally native audiences. By listing tokenized share classes on a public blockchain, asset managers can reach new investor groups without sacrificing traditional transfer agent recordkeeping. This hybrid model maintains regulatory compliance while tapping into new markets, features, and capabilities unique to blockchain. Blockchain Innovation Trends: Tokenized U.S. Treasury and money market funds have seen their assets under management grow from virtually zero to tens of billions of dollars, including BlackRock's BUIDL (BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) and Franklin Templeton's BENJI (Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund). These instruments function similarly to yield-generating stablecoins, but with institutional-grade compliance and backing. This allows asset managers to serve digitally native investors by offering greater flexibility through segmentation and programmability, such as automatic rebalancing of baskets or yield tranches. On-chain distribution platforms are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Asset managers are increasingly partnering with blockchain-native issuers and custodians, such as Anchorage, Coinbase, Fireblocks, and Securitize, to tokenize fund units, automate investor onboarding, and expand their reach across geographies and investor categories. On-chain transfer agents can natively manage KYC/AML, investor whitelists, transfer restrictions, and cap tables through smart contracts, reducing the legal and operational overhead of fund structures. Leading custodians ensure the secure custody, transferability, and compliance of tokenized fund units—enabling greater distribution options while meeting internal risk and audit standards. Issuers want to instantiate their funds as decentralized finance (DeFi) primitives and access on-chain liquidity to expand their total addressable market (TAM) and increase their assets under management (AUM). Asset managers can tap into new liquidity by listing tokenized funds on protocols like Morpho Blue or integrating with Uniswap v4. BlackRock's BUIDL fund, added as a yield collateral option to Morpho Blue in mid-2024, marked the first time traditional asset management products became composable in DeFi. Recently, Apollo also integrated its tokenized private credit fund (ACRED) into Morpho Blue, introducing a new yield enhancement strategy not possible in the off-chain world. The ultimate result of collaborating with DeFi is that asset managers can evolve from costly and slow capital allocation to direct-to-wallet access, creating new yield opportunities and capital efficiency for investors. When issuing tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), asset managers have largely moved beyond the choice between permissioned networks and public chains. In fact, they are clearly favoring public and multi-chain strategies to achieve wider distribution of their products. For example, Franklin Templeton's tokenized money market fund (represented by the BENJI token) is distributed across blockchain platforms such as Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Stellar. By partnering with prominent public chains, these products also benefit from enhanced liquidity, benefiting from ecosystem partners across blockchains—including centralized exchanges, market makers, and DeFi protocols. Companies like LayerZero enable these multi-chain strategies by facilitating seamless cross-chain connectivity and settlement. Tokenization of Real-World Assets (RWAs) The trend we're observing is toward the tokenization of financial assets—such as government bonds, private sector securities, and stocks—rather than physical assets like real estate or gold (although these can and have been tokenized). In the context of tokenizing traditional funds (such as money market funds backed by U.S. Treasuries or similar stablecoins), the distinction between "wrapped tokens" and "native tokens" is crucial. The differences lie in how the token represents ownership, where the primary record of shares is kept, and the level of blockchain integration. Both models advance tokenization by connecting traditional assets to the blockchain, but wrapped tokens prioritize compatibility with traditional systems, while native tokens strive for full on-chain conversion. To illustrate the distinction between wrapped and native tokens, here are two examples. BUIDL is a wrapped token that tokenizes shares of a traditional money market fund that invests in cash, U.S. Treasuries, and repurchase agreements. ERC-20 BUIDL tokens digitally represent these shares and circulate on-chain, while the underlying fund operates as a regulated off-chain entity under U.S. securities laws. Ownership is whitelisted for qualified institutional investors and minted/redeemed through Securitize and BNY Mellon as custodians. BENJI is the native token representing shares of the FranklinChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX), a $750 million fund invested in U.S. government bonds. The blockchain serves as the official record system for processing transactions and recording ownership, making BENJI a native token rather than a wrapper. Investors can subscribe to BENJI in USDC redeemable through the Benji Investments app or institutional portal, and the token supports direct on-chain peer-to-peer transfers. As part of issuing tokenized funds, asset managers may require a digital transfer agent (DTA) that adapts traditional transfer agent functionality to a blockchain environment. Many asset managers partner with Securitize, which facilitates the issuance and transfer of tokenized funds while maintaining accurate and compliant books and records. These DTAs not only improve efficiency through smart contracts but also open up new possibilities for traditional assets. For example, Apollo's ACRED (a wrapped token that provides access to Apollo's off-chain diversified credit funds) has been enabled through DeFi integration, optimizing its lending and yield profile. Securitize facilitated the creation of sACRED (an ERC-4626-compliant version of ACRED), allowing investors to participate in leveraged revolving strategies using Morpho, a decentralized lending protocol. While wrapped tokens require a hybrid system to reconcile on-chain operations with off-chain records, other companies have gone a step further by processing native tokens through on-chain transfer agents. Franklin Templeton worked closely with regulators to develop its proprietary, in-house on-chain transfer agent, enabling instant settlement and 24/7 transfers for BENJI. Other examples include Opening Bell, a partnership between Superstate and Solana, which also has an in-house on-chain transfer agent that supports 24/7 transfers. Where should wallets be located? Asset managers shouldn't treat wallets—how clients access their products—as an afterthought. Even when choosing to "outsource" issuance and distribution to transfer agents and custodian providers, asset managers need to carefully select and integrate wallets. These choices will impact everything from investor adoption to regulatory compliance. Asset managers often use Wallet-as-a-Service (WaaS) to create investor wallets for them. These wallets are typically custodial, so the service automatically enforces Know Your Customer (KYC) and transfer agent restrictions. But even if the transfer agent "owns" the wallet, asset managers still need to embed these APIs into their investor portals—selecting a partner whose SDK and compliance modules align with their product roadmap. Other key considerations for tokenized funds lie in fund operations. Asset managers need to determine the degree of automation of net asset value (NAV) calculations, for example, whether to use smart contracts for intraday transparency or rely on off-chain audits to determine the final daily NAV. These decisions depend on the token type, the underlying asset type, and the regulatory compliance requirements of the specific fund type. Redemptions are another key consideration, as tokenized funds allow for faster exits than traditional systems but have inherent limitations in liquidity management. In both cases, asset managers tend to rely on their transfer agents for advice or integrate with key providers such as oracles, wallets, and custodians. As mentioned in the "Custody Decision" section above, consider the regulatory status of your chosen custodian. Under the SEC's Custody Rule, custodians must be qualified and obligated to safeguard client assets. Fintech Companies: Fintech companies, particularly those in payments and consumer finance (also known as "PayFi"), are leveraging blockchain to build faster, cheaper, and more globally scalable services. In a highly competitive market where speed of innovation is crucial, blockchain provides out-of-the-box infrastructure for identity, payments, credit, and custody, often with fewer intermediaries. Fintech companies aren't trying to replicate existing systems; they're trying to transcend them. This makes blockchain particularly attractive for cross-border use cases, embedded finance, and programmable money applications. For example, Revolut's virtual card allows users to use cryptocurrency for everyday purchases, while Stripe's stablecoin financial account allows businesses to hold stablecoin balances in 101 countries. For these companies, blockchain isn't about improving infrastructure or increasing efficiency, but about building something that wasn't possible before. Tokenization allows fintech companies to embed real-time, 24/7 global payments directly on-chain, while also unlocking new fee-based services around issuance, exchange, and fund movement. Programmable tokens enable native functionality like staking, lending, and liquidity provisioning within their applications, deepening user engagement and creating diversified revenue streams. All of this helps retain existing customers and win new ones in an increasingly digital world. We are seeing key trends emerging around stablecoins, tokenization, and verticalization. Three Key Trends: Stablecoin payment integration is revolutionizing payment rails, offering 24/7/365 transaction settlement services, a stark contrast to traditional payment networks constrained by banking hours, batch processing, and jurisdictional constraints. By bypassing traditional card networks and intermediaries, stablecoin rails significantly reduce transaction fees, foreign exchange fees, and commissions, particularly in peer-to-peer and B2B use cases. Smart contracts allow businesses to embed functionality like conditions, refunds, royalties, and installments directly into the transaction layer, unlocking new revenue models. This has the potential to transform companies like Stripe and PayPal from aggregators of banking services to platform-native, programmable cash issuers and processors. Global remittances remain plagued by high fees, long delays, and opaque foreign exchange spreads. Fintech companies are turning to blockchain settlements to reshape how value moves across borders. Using stablecoins, such as Solana or USDC on Ethereum, or USDT on Bitcoin, businesses can significantly reduce remittance fees and settlement times. For example, Revolut and Nubank have both partnered with Lightspark to enable real-time cross-border payments on Bitcoin's Lightning Network. By storing value in wallets and tokenized assets rather than through banks, fintech companies gain greater control and speed, especially in regions with unreliable banking systems. For players like Revolut and Robinhood, this allows them to become global money movement platforms, rather than just neobank wrappers or trading apps. For global payroll providers like Deel and Papaya Global, paying employees in cryptocurrency or stablecoins is becoming an increasingly popular option due to its instantaneous nature. Crypto-native fintech companies are building out the underlying stack, launching their own blockchains (L1 or L2) or acquiring companies that reduce reliance on third-party providers. Using Coinbase's Base, Kraken's Ink, and Uniswap's Unichain (all built on the OP Stack) is like moving from owning an app on Apple's iOS to owning the mobile operating system and all the platform leverage it entails. By launching their own L2, fintechs like Stripe, SoFi, or PayPal can capture value at the protocol level to complement their front-end offerings. Having their own chain also allows for customized performance, whitelisting, KYC modules, and more—critical for regulated use cases and enterprise clients. Launching a dedicated payment chain on the Ethereum L2 blockchain, Optimism, through its modular, open-source software framework, OP Stack, can help fintech companies move from closed "walled gardens" to a more diverse and open market for financial innovation. This allows other developers and companies to not only contribute to their growth but also generate network revenue. As a first step, many fintech companies offer a basic set of services, including buying, selling, sending, receiving, and holding cryptocurrencies for a small number of tokens, before gradually adding other services like yield and lending. SoFi recently announced plans to reopen cryptocurrency trading after exiting the sector in 2023 due to regulatory restrictions. One advantage of offering cryptocurrency trading is that, as mentioned above, SoFi allows its customers to participate in global remittances, but other possibilities are also in the works—for example, tying into its main lending business but using on-chain lending (similar to Morpho's Bitcoin-backed lending partnership with Coinbase) to improve terms and transparency. Building Proprietary Blockchains: Many cryptocurrency-native "fintechs"—Coinbase, Uniswap, World—have built their own blockchains to tailor their infrastructure to specific products and users, reducing costs, increasing decentralization, and capturing more value within their ecosystems. For example, with Unichain, Uniswap can aggregate liquidity, reduce fragmentation, and make DeFi faster and more efficient. The same verticalization strategy could make sense for fintechs looking to enhance the user experience and internalize more value (as we saw with Robinhood's recent L2 announcement). For payment companies, a proprietary, in-house blockchain is likely to be a user experience-first infrastructure (e.g., one that abstracts or hides the native user experience of cryptocurrencies) with a greater focus on products like stablecoins and features like regulatory compliance. Below are some key considerations for building a proprietary blockchain, with varying tradeoffs at varying levels of complexity. Layer 1 is the most burdensome and complex of all partnerships, and benefits the least from network effects. However, Layer 1 also gives fintech companies the greatest control over scalability, privacy, and user experience. For example, a company like Stripe might embed native privacy features to comply with global regulations or customize its consensus mechanism to achieve ultra-low latency for high-volume merchant payments. One of the core challenges of building a new Layer 1 is bootstrapping the chain's economic security—attracting significant staking capital to safeguard the network. EigenLayer democratizes access to high-quality security. By shifting the paradigm from siloed, capital-intensive Layer 1 to a shared, efficient model, such services help accelerate innovation and reduce failure rates in blockchain development. Layer 2 is often a good compromise, allowing fintech companies to operate with a single sorter while providing a degree of control. The sorter collects incoming user transactions and determines the order in which they should be processed before submitting them to the Layer 1 for final verification and storage. The design of a single sorter speeds up development and provides greater control over operations, ensuring reliability, fast performance, and profitability. Furthermore, creating Layer 2 on Ethereum is easier by partnering with rollup-as-a-service (RaaS) providers or established Layer 2 consortiums like Optimism's Superchain, which offer shared infrastructure, standards, and community resources. Companies like PayPal could build a "payments superchain" on the OP Stack to optimize its PYUSD stablecoin, enabling it to support real-time use cases like in-app transfers on Venmo. They could also seamlessly bridge PYUSD to the Optimism superchain ecosystem, initially using a centralized orderer to achieve predictable fees (e.g., less than $0.01 per transaction) while still retaining the security of Ethereum. Furthermore, they could choose to partner with RaaS providers like Alchemy (and its partner Syndicate) for rapid deployment—potentially within weeks, compared to the months or years required for L1. The simplest approach is to deploy smart contracts on an existing blockchain, something companies like PayPal are already experimenting with. Blockchains like Solana, with their established scale, user base, and unique assets, are particularly attractive to fintech companies looking to build on existing Layer-1s.
How permissionless should fintech applications and/or blockchains be? A blockchain's superpower lies in composability—the ability to combine and remix protocols so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
If an application or blockchain requires permission, composability becomes more difficult, making it harder to see new and interesting applications emerge. For example, choosing to build a permissionless blockchain not only aligns with the broader fintech trend toward open ecosystems but also allows PayPal to capitalize on its competitive moat. By inheriting PayPal's compliance layer, developers worldwide have a better chance of attracting users to their applications; more users drive more network activity, which in turn leads to greater value capture for PayPal. Unlike L1 blockchains like Ethereum, L2 offloads much of the work to collators, enabling higher throughput while still inheriting the security properties (and advantages) of L1. As mentioned above, collators represent a significant point of "control," and single-collator rollups like Soneium offer an interesting path forward, allowing operators to influence transaction latency and block specific transactions. Building on a modular framework like OP Stack not only increases revenue but also expands the utility of other core products. For example, PayPal and its PYUSD stablecoin, their own L2 not only generates collator revenue but also ties the chain's economics to PYUSD. As the initial collator operator, PayPal can collect a portion of transaction fees (also known as "gas fees"), similar to the revenue Coinbase's OP Stack L2 Base earns from its collators. By modifying OP Stack's gas payments to accept PYUSD, PayPal could offer "free" transactions (e.g., withdrawal fees) to existing PayPal users and improve the speed of use cases like Venmo transfers and cross-border remittances. Similarly, PayPal could stimulate developer activity by offering low or no cost, but then charge a modest premium for integrations like the PayPal Wallet API or compliance oracles.
Banks, asset managers, and fintech companies have many questions about blockchain adoption: Given the rapid pace of development in the cryptocurrency world, how should they understand the technology and the opportunities it presents? Here are the key lessons we've learned:
Start with customer segmentation and tailor solutions.Not all customers are the same—institutional users require a compliant, custodial setup, while retail investors generally prefer user-friendly, self-custodial options for everyday access.
Make security and compliance non-negotiable. Almost all counterparties, whether regulators or clients, expect you to do this.
Leverage partnerships to increase expertise and speed. You don’t have to build everything yourself. Collaborate with subject matter experts and partners to reduce time to market and create new revenue opportunities with innovative solutions.
Blockchain can—and should—become the core infrastructure that secures the future of TradFi institutions while leading them to new markets, new users, and new revenue.
Mastercard launched its Crypto Credential service in the UAE and Kazakhstan to simplify cryptocurrency transactions by using secure aliases instead of complex wallet addresses.
AnaisNansen has teamed up with TON Blockchain, a high-performance Layer 1 developed by Telegram, to introduce advanced analytics tools that will enhance insights, drive innovation, and accelerate Web3 adoption. What new tools can we expect next?
CatherineStandard Chartered has launched digital asset custody services in Luxembourg, focusing on Bitcoin and Ether, to cater to institutional investors in Europe.
WeatherlyThe US Senate Banking Committee, led by Senator Tim Scott, is set to establish the first-ever cryptocurrency subcommittee. This comes just before Trump’s inauguration, which is expected to launch pro-crypto regulatory initiatives.
KikyoTether is expanding into AI filmmaking, hiring experts and planning to grow its team to 200 by mid-2025. The company is also investing in AI and cloud computing to enhance scalability and technology.
AnaisA UK court denied James Howells' bid to recover a hard drive with 8,000 Bitcoin buried in a Newport landfill, citing high excavation costs and environmental concerns. Mined in 2009, the lost Bitcoin is now worth over $750 million.
CatherineEl Salvador continues to buy Bitcoin, including a recent purchase of 11 BTC, increasing its total holdings to over 6,000 BTC. President Bukele has also expressed interest in acquiring Bitcoin seized by the U.S. government, further solidifying the country’s commitment to cryptocurrency.
Anais
AlexHo Chi Minh City is using AI to control traffic lights at key intersections to improve traffic flow and reduce congestion. The city is also testing Digital Twin technology to monitor real-time conditions and plans to expand these systems to more areas.
WeatherlySingapore has blocked Polymarket, labelling it an unlicensed gambling platform under its strict betting laws. The platform also faces regulatory scrutiny in the US and France, putting its global future in question.
Catherine