Uphold survey finds 75% of U.S. banks have blockchain programs, 22% live

Fifty-four percent of American banks have issued requests for proposals to digital asset vendors and partners, and two-thirds have allocated money for blockchain infrastructure. Those two figures, from a survey of U.S. banks that Uphold commissioned and American Banker carried out and The Defiant reported, describe purchasing rather than opinion. A bank with a live RFP typically has a budget, an evaluation committee and a deadline, which is a considerably later stage of the process than having formed a favorable view of the technology.

The study's headline is broader: 75% of American banks have blockchain finance programs underway. Divided up, the figure describes an industry that is mostly still deciding—22% of respondents have projects that are live or scaling, while the remaining 53% are piloting or assessing specific use cases. Three banks in four are somewhere in the pipeline, and roughly one in five is running production infrastructure.

Two caveats attach to that split. The study bundles two different activities—piloting a defined use case and assessing whether to have one at all—into the single 53%. The research also has a commercial sponsor: Uphold describes itself as an infrastructure provider for on-chain finance and sells into the market the survey examines, so the findings arrive with an interest attached.

Respondents spanned multinationals, regional banks and credit unions, but the sample leans large: more than half of them report more than $50 billion in assets under management, 53% of the total, and a sample weighted that heavily toward big balance sheets will describe the top of the market more accurately than the whole of it. Read that way, the 75% is a statement about the largest American banks, not the median community lender.

Two organizational markers point the same way: 72% of institutions have appointed an executive accountable for digital asset or blockchain strategy, and 68% say they have the regulatory and compliance capabilities the work requires in house. A named owner is what turns a steering committee into a roadmap, and compliance capacity is what lets a roadmap survive an examination. Both are prerequisites for spending at scale, and neither is the same thing as a live service, which is why the distance between 72% and 22% is the most revealing gap in the study.

The compliance number deserves its own look: 68% say the capability exists while regulatory uncertainty ranks among the three barriers banks named, and both can be true—the capability that exists covers the rules as they stand, written by agencies working without a statute, while the uncertainty concerns what those rules will say next. Staffing for the current regime is not the same as hedging the next one.

Banks were also asked what slows them, and the constraints they named are mostly internal: cybersecurity concerns and risk management and operational risk concerns each drew 47%, the top two barriers, with regulatory uncertainty rounding out the top three. Cyber exposure and operational risk are capability problems that a statute does not fix, so even the comprehensive framework the Clarity Act's failure delayed would leave most of that list standing.

Where the work is aimed is the survey's quieter finding: among the institutions whose initiatives are live, in pilot or under evaluation, 65% are designing services for commercial customers, 52% for retail customers and 47% for wealth management—corporate banking first, consumers second, private clients third. Two-thirds of all respondents (66%) expect the benefits to be shared between the bank and its customers, and for wealth managers waiting on their banks to fund a digital asset platform, the ordering is the answer.

Uphold's chief executive reads all of it as evidence that the legislative stalemate has not stopped the build. "Blockchain powers cheaper, faster and better financial services," Simon McLoughlin said, pointing to customers who have grown up with instant, borderless messaging, and on the Clarity Act he was explicit that its failure "has delayed a comprehensive legal framework for the US market, but it has not stopped progress," crediting the SEC and CFTC with moving "swiftly to fill the regulatory gap." Regulation, he added, is "no substitute for durable legislation"—a concession that the current footing is provisional, even as he called the direction clear and irreversible.

That framing is consistent with what this publication has argued since the Clarity Act died at 49-50: market-structure questions now rest with the agencies, which have been writing the rules through staff guidance and pending rulemakings. The CFTC has an untitled crypto rule sitting at the White House with no built-in expiry, while the SEC's relief for tokenized equities runs on a five-year clock. Banks answering this survey are planning into that patchwork rather than waiting for it to resolve by statute, and that is the study's most durable implication — the one that least depends on who paid for it.

An RFP is the last cheap step before a vendor contract, which makes the 54% the figure to track. The vendor selections that follow over the next few quarters will show whether three-quarters of American banks were describing an attitude or a budget line, and they will be legible in a way survey answers are not. If wealth management's 47% climbs toward the commercial figure of 65% in a later version of this research, the private-client channel will have moved from the back of the queue toward the front of it.