Key takeaways

• Banks have three real options for crypto: build the infrastructure in-house, partner with a licensed vendor, or adopt permissioned blockchain for settlement and compliance.
• For most banks, partnering is the fastest, lowest-risk path. Building only pays off at scale and with a multi-year commitment.
• Permissioned blockchain is an infrastructure decision, not a customer-facing crypto product. Treat it as a separate decision.
• Demand is no longer in doubt. In the US, River’s analysis of the top 25 banks found that 60% of them offer trading or custody of digital assets or have announced plans to. In Europe, CheckSig’s 2026 Crypto Banking Survey found that 62% of Italian banking clients expect crypto services from their own bank. forklog
• Check the regulation in your jurisdiction first. It decides which product features you’re allowed to offer.

Why is “should we do crypto?” the wrong first question?

It’s the wrong question because demand and regulation have mostly answered it. The question that matters now is how to offer crypto: build, partner, or adopt permissioned blockchain for a narrower use case.

A few years ago, regulatory uncertainty made any crypto commitment risky, so a yes/no framing made sense. That has changed. In the EU, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) sets one licensing framework across all member states. According to CheckSig’s 2026 survey, 69% of clients who want crypto services from their bank would switch providers to get them. For banks without a crypto offering, staying out now carries its own competitive risk.

The US shows the same shift from the supply side. Three of the “big four” US banks, with combined assets of over $7.3 trillion, have shown interest in the industry, according to River’s research. forklog

What does building crypto infrastructure in-house require?

Building in-house means owning four capabilities that a traditional core banking stack doesn’t have:

• Custody: secure key management for customer assets.
• Market infrastructure: execution, liquidity access, and settlement.
• Crypto-specific compliance tooling: transaction monitoring built for blockchain-native risk patterns, not just fiat anti-money-laundering (AML) rules.
• Security operations: protection against a threat model most bank security teams haven’t faced before.

Building is the highest-control, highest-cost, and slowest-to-market of the three paths. It pays off when digital assets are a core strategic priority, when you have the scale to absorb a multi-year build, and when you want to own custody directly instead of delegating it. For most banks, that bar is high.

How do vendor solutions for blockchain in banking operations work?

When you partner, the vendor owns custody, market infrastructure, and often the compliance tooling. Your bank keeps the customer relationship and the product experience. It works much like payments processing or card issuing: the infrastructure is regulated and complex enough that owning it rarely makes sense below a certain scale.

US regulators have made this model explicit. The OCC has confirmed that national banks are permitted to outsource to third parties bank-permissible crypto-asset activities, including custody and execution services (Interpretive Letter 1184). pymnts

Evaluating a crypto vendor is like evaluating any infrastructure vendor, with a few crypto-specific checks:

• Does the vendor hold the right licenses in every jurisdiction you operate in? Can you verify that independently?
• How is custody structured? Are assets held on your balance sheet, off it, or in a structure that changes by jurisdiction?
• What’s the actual integration surface with your core platform and KYC/AML stack? Ask for specifics, not a generic API description.
• What happens to your roadmap if the vendor changes pricing, gets acquired, or exits a market?

Integration is where most of the risk sits. A crypto vendor that can’t connect cleanly to your core ledger and onboarding flow creates the same problems described in our article on reducing operational risk in core banking modernisation.

How are banks already offering cryptocurrency trading services?

Most banks offering crypto today use one of three models. None of them requires the bank to build custody or market infrastructure itself.

1. Trading embedded in an existing platform through an infrastructure partner. Morgan Stanley will offer cryptocurrency trading on E*Trade from the first half of 2026 through a partnership with Zerohash, an infrastructure provider for digital assets. Similarly, PNC has partnered with Coinbase to let wealth and asset management clients trade cryptocurrencies directly through their PNC accounts, with no separate platform needed. Yahoo Financebankingexchange

2. Crypto built into the bank’s own app through a licensed provider. The customer buys and holds crypto without leaving the bank’s app. The licensed provider handles custody and compliance in the background. This model is common in MiCA-regulated markets, where banks can check a provider’s license against a single EU framework.

3. Advisory-led exposure. Wealth and private banks let advisors recommend regulated crypto products, such as ETFs, instead of offering direct spot trading. For example, Morgan Stanley is preparing to let its 15,000 brokers recommend spot Bitcoin ETFs, with suitability guardrails and allocation limits in place. bankingexchange

All three are partner-path decisions with a different customer-facing wrapper.

Should banks adopt permissioned blockchain for compliance?

Only if your goal is operational: faster settlement, reconciliation, or cross-border payments. Permissioned blockchain is a separate decision from offering crypto to customers, and mixing the two up is a common cause of confused internal debate.

A permissioned blockchain is a shared ledger where only approved institutions can validate transactions. Banks use it where several parties need a faster, more transparent shared record. It isn’t used for customer-facing digital asset trading.

You can adopt permissioned blockchain for interbank settlement without any customer crypto product, and the reverse also works. Treating them as one decision usually puts the wrong stakeholders in the room. A settlement infrastructure project and a retail trading product have almost nothing in common operationally.

How does crypto regulation affect bank product design?

Regulation decides which product features you’re allowed to build before design even starts. That’s why you should assess your regulatory position before choosing build or partner, not after.

In the EU, MiCA creates one licensing regime for crypto-asset service providers. This makes partnering easier, because banks can check whether a vendor is properly licensed to hold custody on their behalf. Your licensing position also decides the product itself: you may offer direct custody as a feature, or only trade execution through a licensed third party.

In the US, the OCC issued Interpretive Letter 1188 in December 2025. It confirms that a national bank may engage in riskless principal crypto-asset transactions as part of the business of banking. In a riskless principal transaction, the bank serves as an intermediary and does not hold the crypto-assets in inventory, instead acting in a capacity equivalent to that of a broker acting as agent. This gives US banks a clear route to offering trading without holding crypto on their own books. compliancealliancecompliancealliance

The practical takeaway: clear custody licensing, as in MiCA markets, tips the economics toward partnering with a vendor that already holds the right licenses. Where licensing is unclear, every option costs more, including partnering, because checking the vendor’s licenses becomes the hard part. It also limits which features you can design around, such as direct custody or execution-only, and spot trading or advisory-only exposure.

Build vs. partner vs. permissioned blockchain: a quick comparison

How does Vacuumlabs help banks with digital assets?

Vacuumlabs is a financial product delivery partner with experience in both regulated core banking and blockchain product work. On the partner path, we design and build the bank-side architecture: the orchestrator, ledger adapter, tax engine, and suitability engine. These are the components that sit between your core platform and the licensed providers that handle custody, execution, and market access.

For crypto, that means integrating with providers like Bitpanda. Their regulated infrastructure covers custody, KYT (Know Your Transaction monitoring), and Travel Rule compliance (sharing sender and recipient data on transfers). Your bank keeps the client relationship, brand, and app experience. On the brokerage side, we take the same integration approach with partners such as Alpaca.

The hard part is rarely the vendor’s API on its own. It’s connecting that vendor cleanly to your core platform, KYC/AML stack, and onboarding flow. It’s also keeping the architecture provider-agnostic, so you can swap partners later without a rebuild.

What we bring:

• Delivery experience across regulated core banking and blockchain product engineering, under one delivery model
• An integration-first approach that connects crypto and custody vendors cleanly to your core platform and KYC/AML systems
• A partnership network that includes brokerage infrastructure providers such as Alpaca
• Regulatory checks built into discovery, including jurisdiction-specific licensing reviews before we recommend build or partner

For more, see our blockchain adoption services. If your team is new to the topic, start with our primer on what ledger technology in blockchain actually means.

What should you ask before committing to a path?

• Is our goal a customer-facing crypto product, internal settlement efficiency, or both? And are we treating two decisions as one?
• If we partner, can we integrate a vendor licensed to hold custody in every jurisdiction we operate in? Can we verify that independently?
• What happens to our roadmap if a vendor changes pricing, gets acquired, or exits a market we depend on?
• Does our core platform and KYC/AML stack actually integrate with the infrastructure we’re evaluating, or is that assumption untested?
• What’s the realistic timeline difference between build and partner for our scope, based on our actual volumes and not a vendor’s pitch?

Frequently asked questions

Should banks build or partner for cryptocurrency platforms?

Most banks should partner. A licensed vendor owns custody and market infrastructure, and the bank keeps the customer relationship, which gets you to market faster with less risk. Building in-house makes sense only when digital assets are a core, multi-year priority and you have the scale to justify owning custody directly.

What vendor solutions exist for blockchain in banking operations?

There are three main types: custody providers (secure key management), execution and market infrastructure providers (trading, liquidity, settlement), and crypto-specific compliance tools. The biggest challenge is usually not the vendor’s capability but how cleanly it connects to your core banking platform and KYC/AML systems.

How are traditional banks offering cryptocurrency trading services today?

Most use a partner. They embed a third-party provider’s trading into an existing brokerage platform, build crypto into their own app through a licensed provider, or let advisors recommend regulated crypto products such as ETFs instead of offering spot trading.

How does cryptocurrency regulation impact bank product design?

Regulation determines which features you’re allowed to offer. In the EU, MiCA licensing decides whether you can offer direct custody or only execution through a licensed third party. In the US, OCC guidance confirms banks can act as intermediaries in crypto trades without holding the assets themselves. Assess your jurisdiction before you lock in product scope.

Should banks adopt permissioned blockchain instead of public blockchain for compliance reasons?

It’s not an either/or choice. Permissioned blockchain serves internal and interbank settlement, reconciliation, and cross-border payments. Public blockchain and customer crypto trading are a separate, product-level decision. A bank can pursue one, both, or neither.

How long does it take a bank to launch crypto services?

It depends mostly on the path. Partnering with a licensed vendor is the fastest route, because custody, execution, and compliance already exist. Building in-house is a multi-year program. Your real timeline also depends on how cleanly the vendor integrates with your core platform, so test that early.

Can a bank switch crypto vendors later?

Yes, if the architecture is designed for it. Keep a provider-agnostic integration layer between your core platform and the vendor. Then a change in pricing, an acquisition, or a market exit doesn’t force a rebuild.

This article was created with AI assistance and refined by our editorial team.