Sentora Research finds that banks, card networks, and asset managers are building their own on-chain infrastructure.
According to Sentora Research’s Fintech Onchain: Annual Report 2026, stablecoins, tokenised cash instruments, and digital asset infrastructure have become part of the fintech operating stack, with activity ranging from payment companies settling card and B2B flows in stablecoins to banks issuing deposit tokens on public blockchains.
The report highlights that on-chain infrastructure has reached production scale, distribution has moved into mainstream financial interfaces, and customers have allocated ahead of their providers.
Institutions Are Building Their Own Rails
Large institutions across banking, payments, and asset management are already committing to on-chain infrastructure at scale.
Payment giants such as Visa reported a US$20 billion-plus annualised stablecoin settlement run rate as of September 2026, and Mastercard acquired stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for up to US$1.8 billion. PayPal’s PYUSD grew roughly 680% year-over-year to a March 2026 peak near US$4.2 billion too.
Banks are moving in parallel. JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform processed more than US$4 trillion in cumulative transfers and roughly US$7 billion daily across eight currencies. Separately, 17 banks including Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo announced a shared tokenised deposit network targeting a first-half 2027 launch.
Société Générale’s FORGE became among the first regulated banks to create lending markets directly on a DeFi protocol (Morpho), and Hong Kong issued its first stablecoin licences in April 2026 to HSBC and Anchorpoint Financial.
Sentora concluded that adoption is broad rather than concentrated in any single institution or business model; the form of institutional commitment has shifted from pilots to costly-to-reverse, board-approved decisions; and a common architecture is emerging in which institutions plug into existing DeFi protocols for lending and distribution while relying on curated vaults and third-party risk management for governance.
Tokenised Assets Cross Into Production
Tokenised assets excluding stablecoins reached US$33.5 billion in on-chain value by July 2026, up from roughly US$5.4 billion at the start of 2025.
The three leading categories are tokenised US Treasuries, tokenised private credit, and tokenised equities, with the latter being the fastest-growing. Long-range forecasts vary widely but point towards further growth in tokenised assets. McKinsey projects US$2 trillion in tokenised assets by 2030, and Standard Chartered predicts US30 trillion by 2034.
Fintech Customers Are Already Allocating Elsewhere
According to a 2026 survey by the National Cryptocurrency Association and The Harris Poll, around 67 million US adults now hold digital assets, with 76% of those holders saying they want to manage digital assets inside their primary banking relationship.
The report frames this as a rate-driven migration: the average US savings account pays around 0.63%, while regulated on-chain dollar strategies distribute between 2.6% and 7%. Sentora states that balances are moving to whichever interface passes the rate through, as evidenced by Kraken’s DeFi Earn product, which passed US$800 million in deposits and 100,000 active depositors within eight months.
Overall, Sentora argues the main barrier to adoption isn’t the maturity of on-chain rails, but the coordination cost of assembling and governing a compliant product across multiple specialist providers. On-chain yield and settlement will see higher adoption when delivered through the compliance frameworks and interfaces a platform already operates, concluding that platforms should treat the next 12 months as an execution year.
Read the report here.
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