JPMorgan’s blockchain payments unit clears about $2 billion in transactions a day across its Kinexys platform, according to a December 2025 report from CoinDesk. That number is bigger than most public crypto exchanges process in a day, and it runs inside one US bank for one product line. The point is that the digital-assets stack now sits inside the regular plumbing of the US financial market, not next to it. Understanding how the pieces fit together is what separates the institutions making money from the ones still writing memos about pilots.
The layers of the US digital asset stack
At the base sit public blockchains. Bitcoin handles store-of-value and ETF reference assets. Ethereum runs most of the institutional smart-contract activity, including tokenized funds and on-chain trading. Solana handles the bulk of high-frequency consumer payments and DEX volume because of its lower fees and faster block times. Layer-two networks like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism sit on top of Ethereum to reduce fees while keeping the underlying security model.
Above the chains sit issuers. Tether and Circle dominate stablecoins, with USDT and USDC together holding about $267 billion of the $323 billion stablecoin market in May 2026. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Ondo Finance issue tokenized Treasury and money-market funds. Real-estate, private credit, and trade finance tokenization sit on a longer-tail set of issuers, most of them small.
Above the issuers sit the on-ramps and off-ramps. Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, and Robinhood handle most US retail flow. Fidelity Digital Assets, BNY Mellon, and Bank of New York handle institutional custody. Stripe, PayPal, and a growing list of fintech APIs handle merchant acceptance and B2B payments. Each of these layers makes money on a different transaction type, which is why a single trade can hit two or three of them on the way through.
How a stablecoin payment actually moves
Start with a US software company that wants to pay a contractor in Argentina. The treasury team holds a USDC balance at Circle. The company initiates a transfer through its payments API. The transaction posts to Solana or Ethereum, depending on the route. Block confirmation takes a few seconds on Solana, a couple of minutes on Ethereum mainnet, and roughly a second on a layer-two like Base. Settlement is final once confirmed, with no chargeback window.
The contractor receives USDC into a wallet. From there the contractor either holds the balance, swaps to a local stablecoin, or converts to pesos through a local on-ramp. The end-to-end cost depends on the route but usually runs under a dollar plus the local conversion spread. The same wire through correspondent banking would cost $20 to $50 and take one to three business days.
Behind the scenes, Circle is the entity that mints and burns the USDC. The US-bank reserves backing the stablecoin sit in cash and short-term Treasuries at banks including BNY Mellon. The GENIUS Act now requires monthly public attestation of those reserves, signed by an audit firm. That governance overlay is what made stablecoin payments acceptable to large US corporate treasurers who would not have touched the product two years ago.
How tokenized funds work in the US market
The mechanics differ slightly for tokenized money-market funds. BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, ticker BUIDL, was launched in March 2024 with Securitize as the tokenization partner. The fund invests in US Treasury bills and repos. Shares trade on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, Aptos, and BNB Chain. The fund held roughly $2.85 billion in assets as of February 2026 per Messari.
An institutional client subscribes to BUIDL by sending USDC to Securitize. Securitize mints fund tokens to the client’s wallet. The yield accrues daily and gets paid out as additional tokens each month. Redemption works in reverse, with same-day USDC settlement available through Circle. The total round trip from idle balance to yield-bearing position now takes minutes rather than the day or two typical for a traditional money-market fund subscription.
Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund and Ondo’s OUSG and USDY products operate on similar models. Each combines a regulated underlying fund with on-chain shares. The competitive battleground is which chain to support, which issuer-of-record arrangement to use, and which institutional onboarding partners to integrate with. Most institutional adopters use BUIDL or BENJI inside otherwise crypto-native treasury operations, with traditional corporate treasurers still in pilot mode.
How US banks plug into the stack
JPMorgan runs the deepest institutional integration. Kinexys, the renamed Onyx platform, handles intraday repo settlement, on-chain FX between USD and EUR, and corporate cash management for clients including Siemens, Ant International, and Trafigura. The platform added GBP support in April 2025. Daily transactions average $2 billion. The bank has signaled that it will expand to the public Ethereum-based Base network rather than keep all activity on its permissioned chain.
BNY Mellon and State Street custody digital assets for institutional clients including Bitcoin and Ether ETF sponsors. Citi and Goldman Sachs run smaller blockchain experiments focused on tokenized money-market funds and intraday liquidity. Regional and community banks mostly access digital assets through partnerships with specialized providers like Anchorage Digital, Fireblocks, or BitGo rather than building their own infrastructure.
The retail-bank side moves more slowly. A few large US banks now allow ETF Bitcoin and Ether exposure through their wealth platforms. Direct spot-crypto trading at the bank app level remains rare, partly because of pending bank regulatory guidance and partly because the economics favor referring the customer to a partner exchange. The shape of the modern US fraud detection stack influences how banks underwrite crypto-related transactions on the deposit side, with new typologies for stablecoin-related scams now included in standard models.
What is changing in 2026
The GENIUS Act is the largest near-term change. By the end of 2026 or early 2027, US issuers of payment stablecoins will operate under federal license rather than state-by-state money-transmitter rules. The expected effect is consolidation, with several smaller stablecoin projects either acquiring federal licenses or shutting down US distribution. Bank issuance of stablecoins is also on the table, with multiple large banks reportedly preparing products.
Tokenized equities are the next product class. Several broker-dealers have filed for permission to offer tokenized US-listed shares for 24-hour trading. The first products will likely be limited to qualified institutional buyers, but the path to retail availability is now visible in a way it was not in 2024. The settlement-cycle efficiency case is straightforward: T+1 settlement on tokenized rails becomes T+0 with finality in seconds.
DeFi yield products are also pulling in institutional capital. Sky Protocol, the rebranded MakerDAO, runs two stablecoins, DAI and USDS, with about $13.4 billion in combined supply as of April 2026 making it the third-largest stablecoin issuer after Tether and Circle. Yield comes from a mix of on-chain lending and Treasury-bill backing. Cross-chain infrastructure delivering on its multichain promise has been a precondition for any of this institutional capital to move at scale.
Operational risk gets more attention as volumes grow. Smart contract bugs, oracle failures, and bridge hacks have moved real money in past years. Institutional adopters mitigate by using audited contracts, by keeping exposure caps per protocol, by routing through regulated custodians, and by holding insurance through providers like Nexus Mutual or specialized commercial carriers. None of these tools is mature compared to traditional financial-market plumbing, and an incident at one of the larger tokenized issuers would likely set the institutional adoption curve back by a year or more.
The story for the US financial market is no longer about whether digital assets are real. The deposit at JPMorgan that becomes a Kinexys token, the money-market subscription at BlackRock that settles in USDC, and the cross-border invoice that pays in stablecoin are all running today inside US-regulated institutions. The US credit and risk infrastructure is now adapting to a market where blockchain-based assets sit alongside traditional securities on the same balance sheets, and the operational rules are being written in real time as the volumes scale.
