The U.S. Banking System Is Being Re-Plumbed for Digital Assets. The Hard Part Isn’t Crypto

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the back office that settles most U.S. securities trades, plans to start trading tokenized stocks, ETFs, and treasuries this month, with a broader launch in October.

The entity protects more than $114 trillion in assets and over 50 firms have signed on, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan.

Tokenization means recording a traditional asset – a stock, a bond, a dollar – as a digital token on a blockchain, the same kind of shared ledger that underpins cryptocurrencies, rather than in the private databases banks use today.

The DTCC is moving the core machinery of U.S. markets, how securities are issued, settled, and held, onto those ledgers.

The rails are being laid

The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, gave the U.S. its first federal framework for payment stablecoins. The rulebook is still being written, however.

Both the Office of Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) issued proposed rules this year, and parts of the banking industry have asked the Treasury to slow down.

Regardless, full implementation is expected in 2027 according to the law firm Morgan Lewis.

The market has moved anyway. Stablecoins hold more than $300 billion in outstanding value, according to a June 2026 BCG and Anchorage Digital report; Visa's stablecoin settlement volume hit $7 billion annual rate in April; Stripe paid $1.1 billion for the infrastructure firm Bridge; and JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo plan a shared tokenized-deposit network to rival stablecoins, due in 2027.

BCG calls the moment an "inflection point" and "a structurally unique window in which incumbent banks can define their position."

Four bets, not one

The report groups the opportunity for banks into four areas, each a job finance already does: trading, moving money, managing assets, issuing securities.

Crypto brokerage and lending are the nearest-term revenue for banks. BCG estimates spot and derivatives trading alone generates $30-60 billion a year, and U.S. regulators have opened the door further, with the OCC now letting banks custody crypto and execute client trades, and the FDIC permitting its supervised institutions to work in crypto under standard risk rules.

Tokenized money is most entangled with U.S. policy. Stablecoins can settle across borders in seconds, and the GENIUS Act requires them backed one-to-one by cash and short-term treasuries.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls them a way to "expand dollar access for billions across the globe" and spur "a surge in demand for U.S. Treasuries."

Furthest out and largest are tokenized funds and real-world assets.

"Every stock, every bond, every fund, every asset, can be tokenized," BlackRock's Larry Fink wrote in 2025. What's more, Citi projects $5.5 trillion of tokenized securities by 2030, against approximately $12 billion today.

However, others are reading the same design as a risk.

The Bank for International Settlements, in its 2025 annual report, argued stablecoins "perform poorly" against the tests money must pass and could threaten financial stability. A rush to redeem them could force fire sales of the very treasuries that back them.

Plus, a token that can be transferred is not necessarily liquid. Most tokenized assets are held, not traded, and specialists told CoinDesk the sector is "still at the start of its hype cycle."

A reality check from the build side

Interest and spending don't yet match up. While EY found that 84% of institutions are using or interested in stablecoins, GlobalData reported operational adoption remained virtually flat through 2025, with about 40% running crypto in core operations.

Claudio González, CTO and EVP at intive, an AI-native software firm that builds financial products for banks and fintechs, sees the gap from the inside.

"There's a gap between the conference-stage conversation and the budget line," he told International Business Times. "For most regulated institutions it's still exploratory rather than funded at scale."

What gets funded, he added, is less visible: fraud prevention, compliance, and core modernization.

"You can't tokenize on top of a system you don't fully understand," he added.

The bottleneck is the core, not the chain

Behind many "future of banking" headlines sits a core system written in COBOL, a language from 1959.

By Reuters' estimate, about 43% of U.S. core banking systems still run on it, and roughly 95% of ATM transactions pass through it.

Replacing that code is slow and costly. Australia's Commonwealth Bank spent more than $1 billion AUD over five years to swap its core.

That helps explain a shift among the banks that did build.

JPMorgan's Kinexys unit now courts rivals onto its network, and most banks rent custody from specialists such as Anchorage and Fireblocks rather than build it themselves.

BCG argues most banks "are not likely to win by recreating the digital-asset stack in-house" and should act as "orchestrators" that integrate outside infrastructure.

For González, the harder problem is knowledge, not code.

"Legacy itself isn't the real bottleneck, it's the lost knowledge around it," he said, pointing to business rules that survive only in undocumented systems and the memories of retiring engineers.

What comes next

The signals point in different directions.

On one side, surveys show appetite, Citi and Fink describe a multitrillion-dollar promise, and the GENIUS Act has opened the legal door.

On the other, the BIS warns of risks to financial stability, GlobalData finds adoption flat, and the tokenized market still sits below the forecasts.

The stakes reach well past any single bank. By requiring stablecoins to hold Treasuries, Washington has tied its digital-asset policy to the dollar's global standing, so the outcome will register anywhere the dollar does.

The near-term tests are already on the calendar: the DTCC's first tokenized trades are due this month, and the GENIUS Act's rules arrive in 2027.

Whether the aging systems beneath American finance are ready for either will decide how far, and how fast, this rebuild goes.