Jessie A Ellis
Apr 14, 2026 19:04
New Fireblocks research reveals massive gap between bank digital asset budgets and production deployment, with custody infrastructure the key bottleneck.
Nearly nine in ten financial institutions have committed budget to digital asset infrastructure in 2026, yet only 16% have actually reached production deployment, according to new research from Fireblocks surveying over 600 C-suite leaders at global banks.
The gap is striking. Budget allocation at this scale signals genuine conviction from banking leadership, but the bottleneck isn’t money—it’s infrastructure decisions that most institutions haven’t resolved.
Fintechs Driving Urgency
What’s pushing banks to move? 43% of respondents pointed to non-bank competitive pressure as the critical driver. Payment providers and digital asset platforms aren’t waiting around, and traditional banks know it.
But here’s where it gets interesting: 76% of banks rate other banks as a strong demand source. Settlement partners and counterparties are requiring digital asset capabilities. The institutions moving fastest are responding to both pressures simultaneously—building defensively against fintech disruption while meeting what their banking partners now expect.
The Compliance Plot Twist
Perhaps the most unexpected finding: 96% expect favorable regulatory conditions, but the strongest advocates aren’t in the C-suite. Security and compliance functions—the people whose job is finding risk—are reading incoming frameworks as specifications to build toward, not barriers to hide behind.
Security teams are leading digital asset initiatives at 30% of institutions. Risk and compliance at 22%. Fewer than 2% of either function reports no engagement at all. When your compliance officers become accelerants rather than brakes, something fundamental has shifted.
The Production Bottleneck
Only 15% describe their custody and wallet governance infrastructure as fully production-ready. This is the real constraint—not regulatory uncertainty, not budget, not executive buy-in. It’s the unglamorous work of custody architecture, wallet governance, and operational sequencing that determines whether a bank can actually run digital asset businesses at scale.
One data point stands out as potentially problematic: just 3% flagged regulatory reporting as a challenge. Given that daily transaction and balance-level reporting is a hard requirement under multiple frameworks now in force or imminent, institutions not planning for this will face painful retrofits at the worst possible moment.
Building Beyond the Entry Point
No institution is building for a single use case. Transaction banks start with cross-border payments and settlement. Investment banks focus on tokenized securities, collateral optimization, and delivery-versus-payment. Digital banks lead with 24/7 settlement. But tokenized securities score high across the board—even at payments-focused institutions.
This tracks with broader market developments. Digital assets briefly surpassed $4 trillion in market value earlier this year, and major players like J.P. Morgan and Citi have already integrated digital asset capabilities into core operations. The infrastructure decisions banks make now will determine whether their broader ambitions are even possible later.
Regional breakdowns covering North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa are expected to follow, along with data on what corporate clients actually need from their banking partners in this space.
Image source: Shutterstock
Source: https://blockchain.news/news/banks-digital-asset-gap-fireblocks-2026-survey
