For years, U.S. banks treated Bitcoin as something best observed from afar.
The assets were isolated from core banking systems due to capital controls, custody concerns and reputational risks, and resided on specialized exchanges and trading apps.
However, that attitude is finally beginning to crumble.
According to River data, nearly 60% of the nation's 25 largest banks are now directly selling, storing, and advising on Bitcoin.
Spot ETF approval dominated headlines in 2024. The story of 2025 is quiet. Cryptocurrencies are moving from fringe allocation to everyday items within mainstream wealth management workflows.
If the current timeline holds, 2026 will be the first year in which Bitcoin looks like the standard commodity rather than the exception.
From ETF pass-through to white label trading
The ETF complex was the first step in the institutional adoption of Bitcoin. This provided banks with a way to meet customer demand within a familiar wrapper, with asset managers and specialist custodians shouldering much of the operational burden.
Notably, ETF trading also provided a real-time stress test for these institutions, as flows were moving in both directions without breaking the market plumbing.
Importantly for the Risk Committee, Bitcoin's volatility can be managed within the established supervisory framework, even if it is not decreasing.
The next step is to allow at least some clients to hold and trade the underlying assets from the same interface they use for everything else.
PNC Financial Services Group's expansion into private banking is the most obvious example. Rather than building a cryptocurrency exchange, PNC is using Coinbase's “Crypto-as-a-Service” stack.
Banks manage customer relationships, suitability checks, and reporting, while Coinbase provides trading and core administrative services behind the scenes.
Variations on that “white label” structure are becoming the industry's compromise. This allows banks to say “yes” to customer requests without having to launch their own wallet infrastructure or blockchain operations.
Additionally, recent guidance from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) clarifies how national banks can treat virtual currency transactions as risk-free principal transactions that involve purchases from liquidity providers and sales to customers at nearly the same time.
This reduces the impact on capital from market risks and makes it easier to set up a Bitcoin desk alongside foreign exchange or fixed income operations.
Still, we remain cautious. Banks are starting with the most sophisticated customers and limited products.
By way of background, Charles Schwab and Morgan Stanley aim to launch spot trading of Bitcoin and Ethereum on their voluntary platforms in the first half of 2026.
Still, access is expected to be measured through strict quota caps, conservative margin rules, and stricter eligibility checks.
regulatory stack
Underpinning this change is a regulatory and charter landscape that increasingly fits traditional institutions better than their emerging competitors.
The GENIUS Act established a federal framework for stablecoin issuers. The OCC has issued conditional national trust charters to crypto companies, creating regulated counterparties that fall within existing risk and capital regimes.
This combination allows banks to assemble a plug-and-play stack. US Bancorp has reinstated its institutional Bitcoin custody service with NYDIG as a sub-custodian.
Other large incumbents, including BNY Mellon, are building digital asset platforms aimed at financial institutions that want their Bitcoin to be held by the same brands that secure U.S. Treasuries and mutual funds.
For wealthy customers, optics are important. Buying Bitcoin through a Morgan Stanley or Schwab interface and having your positions appear on the same dashboard or statement as other securities feels fundamentally different than transferring funds to an offshore venue.
As such, banks are using their trust and regulatory standing to reposition crypto exchanges and infrastructure companies as back-end utilities rather than front-of-house brands.
As a result, the normalization schedule is compressed, but not instantaneous.
Starting in January 2026, Bank of America will allow Merrill, Private Bank, and Merrill Edge advisors to recommend crypto exchange-traded products.
This would move Bitcoin away from “unilateral” access to assets that can be incorporated into model portfolios, and would expose it to the same allocation mechanisms that flow to equity and bond ETFs.
New piping, new risks
The same architecture that makes it easy for banks to respond quickly also introduces new vulnerabilities.
Most institutions offering or planning to provide access to cryptocurrencies have not built their own vaults. Instead, it relies on a handful of infrastructure providers such as Coinbase, NYDIG, and Fireblocks for execution, wallet technology, and key security.
That concentration creates another kind of systemic risk. The risk-free principal model and ETF wrapper limit the amount of full market risk that banks need to take on their balance sheets.
However, counterparty and operational risks are not eliminated.
As such, a major outage, cyber incident, or enforcement action at a core sub-custodian could not only impact individual crypto traders, but could simultaneously spill over into the private banking sector, institutional custodian operations, and model portfolios of multiple large institutions.
Given this, banks are literally tying their reputations and service levels to vendor resiliency that didn't exist 10 years ago.
Risk teams can try to alleviate this problem by insisting on modularity so that vendors can be swapped out, and by keeping initial programs small relative to the overall estate.
But the direction is clear. The increasing share of Bitcoin exposure will place it at the intersection of large banking wealth platforms and concentrated crypto professionals.
From pilot products to standard products
Consolidation is proceeding despite residual risks.
US Bancorp’s resumption of custody, PNC’s private bank deal, Schwab and Morgan Stanley’s 2026 targets, Bank of America’s advisory go-ahead, and JPMorgan’s crypto adoption all point to the same outcome. In other words, Bitcoin is woven into the operational fabric of mainstream finance, rather than operating outside of it.
None of this guarantees a smooth transition, as BTC price volatility remains, policies may change, and major incidents in crypto infrastructure may delay or reverse parts of the roadmap.
But if the current trajectory holds, by 2026 the question facing many high-net-worth clients will be less about whether their banks offer Bitcoin at all and more about how to split their exposure between ETFs, direct holdings, and advisory models. It will also be important to know which institutions can be trusted between them and the underlying rails.
Banks may not have chosen Bitcoin as their preferred innovation project. They accept it because their clients already accept it.
The ongoing pivot is to build enough machinery around the assets so that these customers and their balances don't drift forever somewhere else.
