Three Quarters of US Banks Are Building Blockchain Services, Survey Finds

Three out of four American banks now have blockchain programs underway, according to a new survey from Uphold in partnership with American Banker, with nearly a quarter of those projects already live or actively scaling. The data marks a measurable inflection point in how traditional finance is approaching distributed ledger technology.

The survey found that 22% of US banks have blockchain projects in production or at scale, while an additional 53% are piloting or formally assessing specific use cases. That leaves just 25% of surveyed institutions with no active blockchain initiative at all.

"75% of American banks have blockchain finance programmes underway: 22% have projects that are live or scaling, while an additional 53% are piloting or assessing specific use cases."

Uphold Research

The 22% live-or-scaling figure is the more consequential data point. Pilot programs are common across enterprise technology; production deployments are not. The gap between "we're exploring this" and "this is running in our core infrastructure" is wide, and crossing it requires regulatory sign-off, IT integration, and real capital commitment. That more than one in five surveyed banks has cleared those hurdles suggests blockchain has moved beyond a proof-of-concept exercise in at least a segment of the industry.

The use cases driving adoption are predictable but significant: faster settlement, reduced correspondent banking costs, and more efficient cross-border payments. These are not new problems. SWIFT's messaging infrastructure, which underpins most international transfers, was built in the 1970s. Banks have known for years that the plumbing is outdated. What has changed is the maturity of enterprise blockchain tooling and, more recently, a regulatory environment that has grown incrementally clearer. The OCC's 2021 guidance permitting national banks to use public blockchains for payment activities, and subsequent clarifications from the Fed and FDIC, gave compliance teams concrete direction.

JPMorgan's JPM Coin, launched in 2019 as an internal dollar-denominated token for wholesale payments, offers a precedent. At the time it was treated as a novelty. By 2023, JPMorgan was processing roughly $1 billion in daily transactions through the system, later rebranded as Kinexys. That trajectory, from skepticism to nine-figure daily volume in four years, is the model other banks are now trying to replicate.

The survey warrants some caution. Uphold is itself a blockchain company, which creates an obvious incentive toward findings that validate the sector. The survey methodology and sample size have not been publicly disclosed, making it difficult to assess whether the 75% figure reflects the full US banking landscape or a self-selected group of more digitally progressive institutions. Community banks and credit unions, which number in the thousands, may look very different from the larger institutions most likely to respond.

The 53% in piloting or assessment phases also deserves scrutiny. Enterprise technology history is littered with pilots that never reached production. Banks spent years evaluating distributed ledger technology for trade finance and syndicated loans in the mid-2010s, and most of those initiatives were quietly shelved. The distinction between "assessing a use case" and "committed to deployment" is not trivial.

Regulatory trajectory will be the decisive variable. The current administration has signaled a more accommodating posture toward digital assets broadly, and stablecoin legislation moving through Congress could resolve one of the largest remaining ambiguities for bank blockchain programs: whether tokenized deposits and bank-issued stablecoins require entirely new regulatory frameworks or fit within existing ones. If that legislation clears, the 53% in assessment phases will have a cleaner path to production. If it stalls or tightens, some portion of those programs will likely be deferred indefinitely.

What the survey captures, methodology caveats aside, is directional momentum that is difficult to dismiss. Banks are not allocating engineering resources and compliance reviews to blockchain because the technology is fashionable. They are doing it because the cost and speed arguments for certain applications, particularly settlement and cross-border payments, have become difficult to ignore at the executive level. Whether 75% of those programs ultimately deliver on their stated efficiency gains is a question the next two years of deployment data will answer.