New Survey Shows American Banks Rapidly Embracing Blockchain to Offer Faster, Cheaper and Better Financial Services

Uphold has published research, carried out by American Banker, showing that three-quarters of U.S. banks have active initiatives related to blockchain or digital-asset services. The report breaks that total down into 22% of institutions that say projects are already live or scaling and an additional 53% that are piloting or assessing specific use cases. The study highlights that banks are beginning to commit capital and formal procurement activity to digital-asset infrastructure: two-thirds of respondents said their institutions had allocated funds for such infrastructure, and 54% reported issuing RFPs to potential vendors and partners. The survey also found that 72% of banks have appointed an executive responsible for digital-asset or blockchain strategy, while 68% said they possess in-house regulatory and compliance capabilities for these initiatives. Respondents identified priority use cases that include digital wallets and custody (72%), digital-asset buy/sell/hold services for wealth management (70%), wallet-led international expansion (65%), stablecoin rails for institutional settlement (64%), and prime brokerage/clearing for institutions (64%). Banks reported building services for multiple client segments: among institutions with active or in-progress initiatives, 65% cited plans for commercial customers, 52% for retail customers and 47% for wealth-management clients. Despite broad interest, the report notes several prominent barriers to deployment. Nearly half of respondents pointed to cybersecurity concerns (47%) and risk/operational risk issues (47%), and 46% listed regulatory uncertainty and compliance requirements as impediments. Uphold’s CEO framed the results as evidence that banks are moving from theory to practice on on-chain finance and noted ongoing regulatory activity from agencies such as the SEC and CFTC, while also referencing the absence of comprehensive legislation following the failure of the Clarity Act. The research sample included decision-makers and influencers across community, regional, super-regional, national/global banks and credit unions; more than half of respondents reported institutions with over $50 billion in assets under management. Uphold described the data collection as blind and said it was not identified as the sponsor of the research.