Over the next decade, wallet infrastructure will be a defining factor in onchain finance. Institutions that invest in robust wallet capabilities in the next 18–24 months will shape how value is moved, held, managed, and issued.
This shift isn’t driven by hype. It’s grounded in a real transformation of how financial markets function. From banking to payments to capital markets, leading institutions are doing more than building products. They’re gaining operational agility, strengthening regulatory partnerships, and deepening customer understanding. This foundation becomes a compounding advantage as the market scales.
Now is the moment to build. Early movers are doing more than just launching use cases. They’re laying the groundwork to own future customer relationships in digital asset finance.
What Wallet Infrastructure Actually Enables
When mobile banking emerged, it was layered onto legacy systems. But with digital assets, it’s different – the infrastructure and the product are intertwined.
Tokenized deposits, stablecoins, programmable payments, and digital securities exist because of blockchain, and you can’t enable them without wallet infrastructure.
Wallet infrastructure isn’t a single tool. It’s your digital asset operating system that connects blockchains with your core banking systems, payment rails, compliance tools, and customer experiences. The architecture you choose should match your strategy.
If you’re building internal capabilities for managing treasuries, operating trading desks, or running payment rails, you need infrastructure that gives you control. That includes how assets are secured (cloud or on-prem), what policies govern transactions, and how it fits into your workflows. Think: hot, warm and cold storage for treasury, vaults for trading, accounts for settlement.
If you’re building customer-facing products, e.g. embedded wallets for neobanks, stablecoin accounts for remittances, or trading wallets for retail, you need infrastructure that scales. API-first, developer-friendly, and flexible enough to support both business-controlled and user-controlled wallets.
This strategic flexibility is why early adopters gain momentum. They can start with one use case—say, crypto treasury management—and expand to others without re-architecting. Same platform, evolving roadmap.
What Leading Institutions Are Building Right Now
Institutions across industries are entering from different starting points, choosing initial use cases based on their strategic priorities which are driven by their location, regulatory environment, and customer base. After that, businesses expand to adjacent products as their strategies evolve.
Banking
Wholesale banks are deploying tokenized deposits to optimize treasury operations across jurisdictions, reducing settlement times from days to seconds and improving capital efficiency. On a regional level, some European banks are offering crypto trading and custody to meet surging client demand for digital assets, and corporate banks like ABN AMRO are issuing digital bonds to help corporate clients raise capital.
For banks prioritizing balance sheet optimization, multi-jurisdictional operations, or retail/commercial customer wallet distribution, they can:
- Integrate wallet infrastructure with core banking systems
- Establish operational and compliance processes for digital assets
- Distribute wallets to their entire customer base
And for private banks, wealth managers and brokers, offering crypto asset trading and custody opens doors to:
- Capturing fee revenue from trading and custody services
- Meeting demonstrated customer demand for digital asset exposure
- Building institutional-grade security and operational processes
- Creating wallet infrastructure that supports broader digital finance products
- Enabling stablecoin acceptance for customers to use funds in demand deposit accounts and get access to stablecoins for payments and off-ramps
Payments
Institutions are enabling stablecoin acceptance and issuance, capturing payment flows that would otherwise bypass traditional rails entirely. For example, payment providers such as Triple-A are using wallet infrastructure for stablecoin acceptance and payouts, responding to emerging payment preferences. Institutions like Conduit are enabling stablecoin-based cross-border payments to address inefficiencies in particularly complex corridors, such as LatAm and Africa.
Wallets also enable remittance providers to access new revenue streams. Stablecoin rails unlock instant settlement and working capital that’s otherwise trapped in correspondent banking chains before agents settlements.
By integrating receiver wallets, funds could:
- Sit in a stablecoin payment account (i.e. a wallet) that the remittance company creates
- Earn yield until the receiver needs the funds
- Be converted only when necessary
Capital Markets
Capital markets firms are issuing tokenized money market funds as yield-generating cash equivalents, making traditionally illiquid products instantly tradable 24/7. By issuing and managing tokenized financial assets like bonds, equities or other securities, these firms are:
- Modernizing capital markets infrastructure for 24/7 settlement
- Offering instant liquidity for traditionally illiquid instruments
- Building capabilities for primary issuance and secondary trading
- Deploying wallet infrastructure that enables adjacent treasury products
These aren’t isolated experiments. They’re different entry points into the same fundamental transformation. Each requires wallet infrastructure as the foundation. Each builds capabilities that unlock adjacent use cases.
The Strategic Window Is Now
The 18-24 month advantage window we’ve outlined isn’t theoretical; it’s a strategic opportunity for forward-thinking institutions to position themselves advantageously. After that, market leaders will have established positions based on operational experience, customer relationships, network effects, and economics that late movers won’t be able to match.
The institutions moving now (BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, ABN AMRO, Wenia), as well as crypto-native companies, neobanks and payment providers (Nubank, Bridge, Revolut, Euronet) aren’t just testing technology. They’re securing strategic positioning before the window closes.
You don’t need perfect clarity on every digital asset product you’ll eventually offer. What you need is to start building the infrastructure foundation that makes any of them possible. The future of finance will be built on wallet infrastructure.
Contact our team to request a demo of our wallet infrastructure and start your digital finance journey today.
