We have spent the last several years working with more than 100 banks to help them build their digital asset capabilities. Across nearly every conversation, the driver is the same: digital assets compress the time between a client’s intent and its execution. ATMs did this for cash access. Electronic trading did it for equity execution. Digital assets are doing it now for settlement itself and for the working capital, risk, and cost that used to sit in the gap while a transaction waited to clear.
What’s also become clear across our conversations is that regardless of what the bank is using digital assets for, it all comes down to one decision, made once: the control layer. Whoever holds the keys when a transaction moves onchain holds approval authority, full position visibility, and control of timing, and the same infrastructure a bank builds once can run collateral pledging, deposit settlement, or card settlement, just by changing what sits on top of it.
At Sibos in Miami later this month, we’ll be talking about how to bring the benefits of digital assets to your business: less capital trapped waiting for settlement, less risk carried in the gap, a more efficient experience for the customer, and revenue for the bank.
Sometimes that’s new revenue. Sometimes it’s efficiency that allows you to win revenue the bank would otherwise lose to someone else. Sometimes it’s a cost saving. That compression shows up differently depending on where a bank sits in a transaction, but the decision underneath it doesn’t change.
Margin Efficiency, Proven In Production
On July 15, 2026, DTCC, whose depository custodies roughly $114 trillion in assets, executed its first live tokenized securities trades in what it describes as the largest tokenization production initiative to date: 22 trades and 18 trading parties across collateral pledges, repo, equity settlement, and CCP margin workflows. Citadel Securities transacted live that day, and J.P. Morgan converted an equity position and posted it as margin at CME Group. The driver here is margin efficiency. Today a desk buffers each venue separately only because it cannot move collateral fast enough. With the surety of real-time settlement that tokenized collateral brings, a desk can hold a single pool of collateral and optimally allocate it in real time, to whichever venue needs it. Just as today, the security itself never leaves the depository.
Canton is one of the networks that institutions are building on directly, including for the DTCC Tokenization Service. It’s designed for financial institutions, giving them the same 24/7 market access a public blockchain offers, without giving up the control regulated institutions require. More than 35 platforms and issuers already connect assets through Canton’s Digital Asset Registry, supporting over 1.5 million daily transactions across the network.
Broadridge’s Distributed Ledger Repo platform, also running on Canton, processed $7.5 trillion in repo transactions in June 2026 alone. It now covers 20 of the 24 primary dealers in the US repo market.
Working Capital Efficiency, Wherever The Cash Leg Sits
A separate effort is moving the cash leg on its own, no asset changing hands, just value.The point isn’t speed for its own sake. Today, wherever settlement looks instantaneous to a customer, someone is funding the gap behind it: the bank, the broker, or the payment company. Digital cash removes the need for anyone to fund it. For example, six regional US banks, Huntington, First Horizon, M&T, KeyBank, Old National, and SouthState, are live as design partners on the Cari Network, a bank-governed tokenized deposit platform built on its own infrastructure, with more than 30 more banks committed to join and another 40 in active discussion, a combined network and pipeline of more than $10 trillion in assets.
Retail has experienced real-time value transfer for years, real-time payments, instant access to funds released when a trade closes, and every time, it’s been funded by working capital sitting quietly in the background, not by settlement actually happening in real time. Interactive Brokers is a clean example: its shortened and early settlement features let clients access shares or proceeds before the underlying trade has actually finished settling, with IBKR carrying that gap internally rather than making the customer wait for it. Digital assets make that same experience possible in wholesale markets too, without a bank having to fund the gap out of its own working capital and credit exposure to provide it.
Card-issuing and acquiring banks are building toward the same driver on the payments side. Open Standard launched OUSD at the end of June, with Visa, Mastercard, and Google among more than 140 founding financial institutions and payment companies, and Fireblocks as a key infrastructure partner. The mechanism is specific: issuing banks can collapse the collateral currently locked in reserve for card settlement, acquiring banks and PSPs get same-day clearing instead of waiting on correspondent timelines, and cross-border treasury movement clears without the correspondent chain (and its FX exposure) at all.
The Race Is For The Bank’s Customer
That’s five different proof points behind one driver: a production event, a repo network, a deposit rail, a broker’s existing playbook, and a payments standard, all compressing the same gap between intent and settlement. DTCC’s trading parties, Cari’s design partners, and OUSD’s founding institutions are each setting the operational rules while the infrastructure is still being built. That influence compounds: the rules a design partner helps write now are the rules every later entrant has to build to. That value doesn’t sit still while banks decide whether to build for it. Non-banks are already racing for the access that lets them compete for the same capital and revenue.
Kraken used a limited-purpose Wyoming charter to win a one-year pilot of a Fed master account, giving it direct payment access most non-banks don’t have. Coinbase took a different route: conditional OCC approval for a national trust charter, a federal custody structure, with no Fed account attached. Neither is ahead of the other, they’re different mechanisms with different outcomes. What they share is the same target: access that lets a non-bank operate more like one.
BUIDL, BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund, shows the same shift in a different market. By launching BUIDL on a permissionless chain, Securitize, acting as transfer agent and placement agent, opened direct access to anyone qualified holding onchain USDC, without requiring the bank distribution channel funds have traditionally relied on.
And on the retail side, Robinhood and Meta are building directly into apps people already use. Robinhood does this on its existing broker and NYDFS crypto licenses, no bank charter involved, aggregating fiat and digital assets into a single view of a customer’s portfolio. Meta is reportedly building stablecoin and wallet features into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for the second half of 2026.
Every one of these is evidence of the same race: for the bank’s customer, whatever door a firm uses to get there. By 2027, expect that race to keep going, and to extend beyond digital money and collateral mobility into parts of banking that used to sit outside anyone’s competitive radar.
Working Across Networks, Not Betting On One
That competition is also playing out at the network layer itself. For regulated institutions, the first standards challenge isn’t moving assets between networks. It’s being able to exchange, across networks, the counterparty and compliance information a regulated institution needs before it can settle at all. Fireblocks is partnering with a broad coalition on the Open Transaction Layer, an open standard for verifying counterparties and exchanging compliance data before a transaction settles onchain: exchanges like eToro, wallet providers like MetaMask, blockchain foundations like the Solana Foundation, trading platforms like Robinhood, and banks, Cross River Bank among them. The standard is open by design: any institution can still join and help build the interoperability this growing ecosystem needs. The earlier a bank joins, the more say it has in how the standard actually works.
The second problem is the infrastructure bet. A bank’s digital asset infrastructure needs to work across networks, not bet on which one wins. Three layers get built regardless: wallet and policy, settlement, and the liquidity layer, the venues and counterparties a bank actually connects to. Build them around a single network instead, and every new connection means starting over: a new key management model, a new security review, a new compliance integration. Build with infrastructure that works across networks, and every new venue or market becomes a simple connectivity exercise.
Closing The Gap To Capture The Value of Digital Assets
What separates a production implementation from a pilot is whether a bank has aligned the pieces that make the case with the pieces that let it execute: a use case with a real value proposition, and the regulation that clears the path to pursue it, on one side; the network to actually run it for customers at scale, and the technical infrastructure to do that securely, on the other.
It’s also what decides who wins the race described above. A charter, a license, or a split model only matters if the institution behind it can actually run the business at scale once it’s approved. Access alone doesn’t decide that race. The control layer underneath it does.
Custody and settlement sit on the same layer once a transaction moves onchain. That layer is a control layer, not just a safekeeping one: whoever holds the keys holds approval authority, full position visibility, and control of timing. And because that layer is configurable rather than fixed to one use case, the same infrastructure a bank builds once can run collateral pledging, deposit settlement, or card settlement, just by changing what sits on top of it. That’s the decision that determines which of those a bank can actually run, at what scale, on what timeline.
88% of financial institutions have committed or will commit budget to digital asset infrastructure in 2026. Budget at this scale doesn’t happen without conviction. Banks already know they need to act. Only 16% are live in production. That’s the gap between committing and building, and it’s the gap we’re closing every day.
If you want to close it properly, talk to Fireblocks. My team and I will be at Sibos in Miami, so come to one of our sessions or stop by our booth.
