Balance Sheet Battlefield

Article author: Sebastien Davies

Article compilation: Block unicorn

Introduction

There is an extremist problem in finance. I have seen some extremists who believe that blockchain will destroy all existing financial institutions. Meanwhile, the traditional finance camp considers Bitcoin to be synonymous with cryptocurrency, and the feeling is reciprocated. Unfortunately, both camps lack the patience to understand the nuances.

I do not subscribe to this either-or binary view. As we can see, the two are likely to converge rather than collide. Visa and Mastercard are actively expanding their cooperative relationships in blockchain-based payments. The traditional finance giant Stripe has also launched a blockchain platform dedicated to handling payments. Our team writes articles on this fusion trend in the two financial areas almost every week.

In crypto commentary, I often see people treat blockchain itself as a unique selling point (USP), because it enables fast, low-cost transactions. It’s true that transferring funds via blockchain is cheaper. But that alone is not the key driver for mainstream adoption of blockchain, because the cost of traditional capital transfer infrastructure is relatively high—and it has nevertheless survived decades of scrutiny.

Companies do not switch banking partners overnight just because another bank offers a few basis points of discount on transaction processing. Financial habits run deep. Businesses need more than cost savings—they need compelling reasons and greater confidence to change the way they move, hold, and invest funds.

What matters here is measurable outcomes. If the public is going to change how funds flow, they need to understand how to optimize the entire flow of capital. Therefore, the focus should be on how blockchain can integrate seamlessly with platforms so users can easily hold, invest in, and borrow funds.

In today’s invited column, Primal Capital partner Sebastien Davies discusses why cryptocurrency infrastructure has failed to trigger mass adoption—and what would be required to achieve it.

The Infrastructure Mirage

For much of the past decade, the global financial industry has been fixated on “rails.” Discussions around digital assets have been almost entirely centered on the mechanical throughput of blockchain, the cryptographic security of decentralized applications, and the theoretical elegance of smart contract logic. This is the infrastructure phase: an era centered on building “containers.” From 2020 to 2024, the entire industry was racing to construct pipelines, vaults, and gateways—aiming to modernize how value flows.

During this period, the growth of the cryptocurrency market was mainly focused on building infrastructure, because without infrastructure, participation simply was not feasible. We built enterprise-grade custody platforms, standardized exchange APIs, and on-chain compliance services to address five key gaps: custody, trading, execution, stablecoin utility, and regulatory reporting.

However, the financial industry is now facing a fundamental truth from financial history. Infrastructure is a necessary prerequisite for conducting activities, but the balance sheet determines who can capture economic value. Merely having a faster or more transparent rail in itself cannot shift the market’s center of gravity. Infrastructure solves the mechanical problem of how institutions participate, but for the far more important question of who can capture value, it does nothing. In the era when infrastructure buildouts were booming, the answer to that latter question still clung to tradition.

Centralized market makers capture the spread, early holders capture appreciation gains, and verifiers earn transaction fees. This phase failed to create a new balance-sheet structure, did not change where deposits are held, and did not fundamentally alter the structure of credit creation.

In response to this argument, a common rebuttal claims that “infrastructure” is the main driver of value, because it lowers the barriers to entry, thereby enabling financial democratization and naturally transferring economic power to the fringes. Supporters of this view believe that technology itself—because it is open source and permissionless—is the force of change. While this is an engaging narrative for a retail-led “crypto-native” world, it doesn’t stand up to institutional realities.

In complex financial markets, cost efficiency is far less important than capital efficiency and risk-adjusted returns. A firm moving ten billion dollars is not because transaction fees are lower; it’s because the balance sheet supporting that capital can provide higher returns or more efficient collateral utility. Infrastructure is a barrier to entry; the balance sheet is the strategic asset that determines the winners of interest-rate spreads.

Financial history repeatedly proves that infrastructure is not the key to market power—balance sheets are. The rise of the Eurodollar market in the 1960s did not require new payment rails or financial technology. It only required U.S. dollar deposits to move out of the U.S. banking system. Once those balance sheets moved, a parallel dollar system emerged—massive in scale and largely beyond domestic regulation.

We are now entering a new stage of restructuring institutional balance sheets. It begins in 2025, when the “battlefield” moves from the protocol layer to the liquidity allocation layer. The first phase focuses on building platforms; the next phase focuses on the movements of participants and the flow of their capital.

In 2024, a treasurer theoretically could hold USDC using mature custody infrastructure when evaluating where to park cash, but economically, traditional bank deposits are still more advantageous because they provide Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance and competitive interest rates. Infrastructure is ready, but the balance sheet has not yet changed. As the regulatory environment shifts from abstract policy design to concrete implementation, this realignment becomes possible.

The next phase of cryptocurrency mainstreaming will no longer be determined by infrastructure, but by the direction of balance sheets.

The Gate to Implementation

For most of the past decade, institutional participation in digital assets has not been limited by a lack of imagination or technology. It has been limited by structural barriers to integrating digital assets into regulated balance sheets. Institutions need more than a fully functional wallet. Clear legal definitions, specific accounting treatment methods, and robust governance structures are basic requirements.

Because there is no widely recognized “custody” definition or a clear compliance pathway, the risk of “balance sheet pollution” is too high to ignore for any regulated entity. Both banks and asset management firms are waiting for an unambiguous signal that they can deploy capital without taking on existential legal risk. As a result, the process of adopting digital assets at scale has fallen into a “wait-and-see” posture.

The era of policy debates is finally coming to an end, replaced by the phase of actual execution. The GENIUS Act passed in May 2025 played a decisive role: it established a national regulatory framework for stablecoin payments, and ultimately provided a legal basis for balance-sheet allocation.

By providing a federal licensing process and requiring 100% reserves to be supported by government-approved instruments, the Act transformed digital assets from speculative novelties into recognized financial instruments. In August 2025, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ended its long-running investigation into the Aave protocol without taking any enforcement action, further consolidating this shift and effectively removing prior regulatory “obstacles” that had hindered institutional participation in decentralized finance (DeFi).

Now, the focus has shifted to the rules manuals of regulators. In February 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released a comprehensive proposed rule designed to implement the GENIUS Act and establish a framework for “approved payment stablecoin issuers” (PPSIs). This is significant because it provides detailed prudential standards (covering reserve composition, capital adequacy ratios, and operational resilience), enabling a chief risk officer or an asset-liability committee (ALCO) to approve digital asset strategies. The passage of the GENIUS Act has brought blockchain regulation into the governance structure of the world’s largest financial institutions.

However, to understand why this shift happens now, we also need to recognize the “balance sheet inertia” that determines institutional behavior. Banks’ operations are constrained by strict regulatory capital adequacy requirements—every dollar of risk-weighted assets must be backed by capital. If deposits flow out of a bank into stablecoins, it must proportionally reduce loans to maintain those capital adequacy ratios. This is painful and expensive contraction that creates ripple effects throughout the economy. That also explains why the adoption of stablecoins has been so slow. Full technical integration takes six to eighteen months, while governance cycles such as audits and board reviews take even longer.

The current environment shows a pattern of “compound acceleration.” As early movers such as JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and U.S. Bancorp begin rolling out stablecoin settlement plans, they send a clear signal to the market: the risk of rushing ahead is being replaced by the risk of lagging behind. We are in a phase of competitive pressure, where peer-bank participation reduces adoption risk across the industry. As these institutional constraints loosen, the path for liquidity to move from legacy systems to new programmable containers in the digital era also becomes smoother. This shift forces us to rethink the essence of capital and move the focus to the “containers” that will carry next-generation global liquidity.

Where Liquidity Lives

To understand the scale of the shift currently underway, we must first recognize the historical stability of financial “containers.” In every monetary era, liquidity eventually has to find a home. This is simply a function of how technology stores value, but it also meets the long-term global demand for safe short-term assets. For centuries, that home has been concentrated in a few clear structures: the balance sheets of commercial banks, the reserves of central banks, and money market funds. These traditional “containers” all play intermediation roles, capturing the economic value generated by the capital they carry.

The “free lunch” mathematical principle indicates that the existence of financial intermediaries is to solve the problem of capital mismatches. Specifically, the cash flows generated by the world’s operations exceed what is needed for their short-term production uses, creating a long-term liquidity surplus that seeks safety. Traditionally, commercial banks convert these excess funds into deposits, invest in long-term assets such as mortgages or corporate loans, and earn a substantial net spread. Net interest margin (NIM) is the guiding light for commercial banks and retail bankers. Bank shareholders are the primary beneficiaries of the “spread,” while depositors receive a portion of the earnings in exchange for liquidity and government backing.

Digital asset infrastructure introduces a new type of “container” that directly competes for capital. These economic restructurings go far beyond merely upgrading technology. When liquidity moves from banks to stablecoin reserve pools or tokenized U.S. Treasury funds, the party capturing returns changes fundamentally. For example, in a stablecoin reserve pool, the issuer (e.g., Circle or Tether) earns the spread between the underlying Treasury yield and the interest paid to token holders, who usually receive zero. In effect, the economic benefit of “holding costs” is transferred from commercial banks to digital asset issuers.

In addition, these new kinds of containers provide transparency and programmability far beyond what traditional structures can offer. Tokenized Treasury funds surpassed roughly $11.5 billion in market value in March 2026, representing a structural evolution in which the yield on the underlying assets accrues directly to holders. This creates powerful economic incentives.

Smart treasurers no longer need to choose between the safety of banks and the yield of funds. They can hold tokenized funds that function both as yield assets and as high-speed settlement media. By redefining where liquidity belongs, digital infrastructure is not just building new rails—it is creating a competitive market for the balance sheets that will support the global economy.

Stablecoin-Driven Migration

Blockchain dollars represent the first large-scale migration of liquidity onto these new types of financial balance sheets, marking the shift of digital currency from a novelty to a core component of the financial system. The stablecoin market is near historical highs, reaching $311 billion, with an annual growth rate of 50% to 70%. This growth completely undermines the claim that stablecoins are merely a speculative phenomenon. We are witnessing real “transfer” of dollars from traditional banking infrastructure to programmable settlement systems.

The most visible economic impact of this migration shows up in deposit substitution. When a company or institutional investor moves $100 billion from traditional bank deposits to a stablecoin container such as USDC, the profitability of the banking system suffers massive losses. In the traditional model, this $100 billion can support banks making loans, generating roughly $3 billion in annual net interest margin. But when this money moves to the reserves of stablecoin issuers, those earnings are extracted. Banks lose deposits and lose the ability to originate loans, while the spread is captured by stablecoin issuers.

This transformation has profound implications for credit creation and financial stability.

Research published by Federal Reserve economists at the end of 2025 emphasized that widespread stablecoin adoption could reduce bank deposits by $65 billion to $1.26 trillion. Such a reduction could reshape how credit is supplied to the economy. Regional banks that rely heavily on stable deposits for local lending are the most exposed to this shift. As retail and corporate savers pursue the advantages of stablecoin settlement 24/7, the long-standing appeal of the traditional “float funds” (i.e., earning spreads in transit payments) that banks rely on for survival is rapidly declining.

In response, the banking industry has shifted from suspicion to active participation.

JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and U.S. Bancorp announced that they will roll out their own stablecoin settlement infrastructure by the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026. This is not intended to “disrupt” their own businesses, but to maintain their important position as liquidity containers. These institutions recognize that the future economic environment favors digital container issuers. By becoming an issuer, banks aim to capture reserve income that would otherwise flow to new entrants. Of course, this first large-scale transfer of capital is only the opening act. As these new liquidity containers gradually stabilize, the competitive focus is shifting toward more complex collateral and leverage—at the heart of global finance.

Programmable Collateral

If cash transfers via stablecoins represent the first wave of this transformation, then the migration of collateral represents a more fundamental reorganization of the core leverage mechanisms of the financial system. Modern financial markets are essentially a massive network of collateral. Even in the U.S. alone, the repo market (responsible for securities lending/borrowing) sees daily trading volume of $2 trillion to $4 trillion. Yet this crucial infrastructure is still constrained by the traditional banks’ “discrete settlement windows.”

In the current setup, collateral can only be transferred during banking business hours. With custody being fragmented, securities held by one bank cannot be immediately used to satisfy another bank’s margin requirements. This friction locks up capital, prevents it from being used effectively, and makes it unable to respond to real-time market volatility.

Tokenization turns collateral from static, geographically constrained assets into programmable, highly liquid instruments.

By converting U.S. Treasuries and other real-world assets (RWAs) into on-chain tokens, institutions can transfer these assets around the clock and settle atomically. The market is growing rapidly; as of April 1, 2026, the tokenized RWA market is about $28 billion, with tokenized Treasuries accounting for roughly half. Much of this growth comes from institutional-grade products such as BlackRock’s BUIDL and Franklin Templeton’s BENJI, which allow holders to earn a 5% yield from the underlying government bonds while the token itself remains liquid and deployable.

The real innovation is “collateral efficiency.”

In traditional repo transactions, investors may need to accept significant haircuts or face delays of days before unlocking securities and transferring them between custodians. In contrast, tokenized collateral is “composable.” Institutional investors can hold $100 million worth of BUIDL tokens, deposit them into protocols such as Aave at a 95% loan-to-value (LTV) ratio, and borrow stablecoins immediately to capture investment opportunities. Collateral always exists in a digital environment. Instead of remaining static, it is continuously revalued via automated price information, and any margin top-up requirements are handled by immediate automated liquidation.

This transformation shifts “trader economics” to “protocol economics.”

In traditional repo markets, large trading banks act as intermediaries: they borrow at one interest rate and lend at another, earning a spread of about 50 basis points. In a tokenized ecosystem, collateral holders can self-match in DeFi lending markets, using software as the intermediary, thereby capturing the entire spread. Although this is still years away from large-scale deployment, the shift could move tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue from traditional dealers to protocol governance and asset holders.

To understand the scale of the shift from cash to collateral more deeply, we must examine the institutional mechanisms that historically dominated these transformations. For decades, the global financial system has used “T+X” settlement logic, where “T” stands for the trade and “X” stands for multi-day delays caused by manual reconciliation and interbank clearing cycles. In traditional repo markets, such delays amount to an invisible tax on capital.

When dealer banks facilitate repo transactions, collateral must be transferred physically between custodians, which typically requires manual intervention to verify collateral discounts and ownership. This creates a “liquidity moat” around the largest dealer banks—banks’ power comes not only from their robust balance sheets, but also from their control over these proprietary settlement systems.

The mechanism of tokenized collateral removes this moat through atomic settlement. The process unfolds in step-by-step institutional workflows:

• Tokenization: Transfer high-quality liquid assets (HQLA), such as U.S. Treasuries, into digital wrappers (e.g., BlackRock’s BUIDL), making them into tokens that can be moved around the clock.

• Instant settlement: Without waiting for Monday morning wire transfers, finance teams can submit these tokenized collateral assets to a lending protocol or a prime broker on Sunday night at 10 p.m.

• Real-time valuation: Smart contracts use decentralized oracles to market-value collateral every few seconds (instead of once per day), which can significantly increase loan-to-value (LTV) because continuous monitoring reduces the risk of “valuation flash-crash gaps.”

• Yield preservation: Crucially, investors keep earning the underlying Treasury yield while their assets are used as collateral—creating opportunities for “yield-on-yield,” which is cumbersome to execute in traditional systems.

For corporate finance teams or asset managers, this transformation is a fundamental revaluation of their idle assets.

In the traditional model, a treasurer manages an interest-poor cash “buffer” to ensure they can meet sudden margin calls or operational needs. With tokenized collateral, this “buffer” can remain fully invested in yield-bearing Treasuries, because holders know these assets can be converted into liquidity within seconds rather than days. This eliminates the former “liquidity haircut” associated with long-term holding of assets.

For the banking industry, the impact is similarly far-reaching.

Banks have long profited from the “floating rates” of the repo market and the intermediary spread. As collateral becomes programmable and self-matching, this profit model will disappear. That is why the emergence of institutional “pipeline systems” (e.g., Anchorage’s Atlas network or JPMorgan’s internal tokenization initiatives) becomes critical. They represent financial institutions’ attempts to build new information silos before competition arrives in the old system. The shift from cash to collateral marks a move of the financial system from a series of “discrete events” to “continuous flows.” Institutions that fail to adapt their balance sheets to this new speed will find their capital growing increasingly static (and therefore increasingly expensive).

On the surface, it looks like an improvement in settlement speed, but in reality it is a reassignment of how capital is deployed, valued, and intermediated.

The S-Curve of Adoption

The migration of institutional balance sheets does not happen overnight—it is a gradual process of absorption, followed by eventual acceleration. This is the reality of the “Web 2.5” era, where blockchain technology is integrated into existing financial architectures rather than replacing them. At present, institutional adoption of blockchain technology is constrained by “balance sheet inertia.” Regulatory capital requirements, risk committee approvals, and legacy technical systems all create significant obstacles. For example, banks cannot simply switch a toggle to move assets. They must maintain strict Tier 1 capital adequacy ratios and ensure that any deposit transfers to digital platforms do not cause a costly contraction in their lending business.

Despite these obstacles, adoption of digital asset infrastructure is following a well-documented historical S-curve, similar to the multi-decade rollout of credit cards and the internet.

Between 2015 and 2024, the market was in a “trial period” and a “regulatory chaos period,” with growth constrained by uncertainty. Now we have entered a “competitive pressure period” (2025–2026), characterized by clearer regulation and more standardized infrastructure. In this phase, “you’re not the first, but you’re also not the last” becomes the main motivation for institutional treasurers. As more banks see peers participating in stablecoin settlement or tokenized Treasury fund offerings, risk perception surrounding adoption drops sharply.

The current market scale sets the foundation for accelerated compounding growth. Fireblocks safeguards transfers of more than $5 trillion in digital assets every year, and the institutional tokenized-asset market is growing rapidly as well. The new system’s “underlying architecture” is production-ready. Standardized infrastructure allows banks to build on top of mature systems without redeveloping proprietary ones.

Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, there are still several “policy levers” that could further accelerate the migration. If stablecoin issuers can directly access Federal Reserve main accounts, or if the interest-rate limitations on payment stablecoins under the GENIUS Act are loosened through consortium “reward” mechanisms, the speed of deposits moving from traditional bank ledgers to digital containers could increase significantly.

The system is ready to form a feedback loop: more stablecoin liquidity will attract more decentralized finance (DeFi) applications (very likely permissioned ones), which in turn will attract more institutional capital, ultimately forming a restructured financial landscape in which the “fight for rails” is decided once the dust settles—and all attention will be focused entirely on strategic balance-sheet management.

Winners of NIM

The transition from the infrastructure phase to the balance-sheet phase marks the shift of “digital assets” discussions from the technological periphery to the very center of global macroeconomics. For years, the industry believed that building better infrastructure would necessarily lead to a more complete system. Now we understand that infrastructure is only the invitation.

Transformation truly happens only when capital itself moves. The “battle for infrastructure” has effectively already been won by standardized institutional-grade money payment custody, tokenized Treasury funds, and the stablecoin framework of federal regulation. The new campaign—one that will determine the financial landscape for the next decade—is the contest over the balance sheets that control global liquidity and collateral.

From 2027 to 2030, structural advantages will belong to companies that can manage these new “digital containers” most effectively. As savers increasingly value around-the-clock settlement and higher-yield, more practical stablecoin returns, we expect commercial banks’ net interest margin (NIM) to continue narrowing. Large enterprises and institutional investors may shift their primary savings and treasury functions to DeFi and the RWA markets, where protocol transparency maximizes the reduction of intermediary spreads. This is not the end of traditional banks, but the end of an era in which banks function as static, unchallenged, low-cost capital warehouses.

In this new era, the winners will be “Web 2.5” hybrid enterprises—or institutions that recognize they are no longer merely lenders, but programmable liquidity managers. By 2030, when the stablecoin market approaches $2 trillion, the line between “crypto” and “finance” will basically disappear.

The entire system will fully integrate rail efficiency into the stability of balance sheets. In this restructured landscape, financial power will no longer belong to the companies with the most innovative technology; it will belong to those that control the final resting containers for global liquidity and collateral. The battlefield has been set, and for the first time the economic landscape has become something that can be contested.

Over the past decade, the focus of cryptocurrency development has been building infrastructure so institutions can participate. The next decade will determine where institutional balance sheets ultimately land.