For years, US banks treated Bitcoin as something best observed from a distance.
The asset lived off specialist exchanges and trading apps, cut off from core banking systems by capital rules, custody concerns and reputational risks.
However, that attitude is finally giving way.
According to facts van River, almost 60% of the country’s 25 largest banks are now somewhere on the path to directly selling, custodial or advising on Bitcoin.
Spot ETF approvals dominated the headlines of 2024. The story of 2025 is quieter: crypto moves from marginal allocation to routine line items within mainstream asset and custody workflows.
If current timelines hold, 2026 will take shape as the first year of Bitcoin looks more like a standard product than an exception.
From ETF passthroughs to white label trading
The ETF complex was the first phase of Bitcoin’s institutional adoption. It offered banks a way to meet customer demand within a familiar package, with asset managers and specialist custodians taking on the bulk of the operational burden.
Notably, ETF trading has also provided these institutions with a real-time stress test, as flows have flown in both directions without breaking the market plumbing.
For risk committees, the conclusion is that Bitcoin’s volatility can be managed within established regulatory frameworks, even if it has not become less volatile.
The next step is to let at least some customers hold and trade the underlying assets through the same interfaces they use for everything else.
The private bank rollout of PNC Financial Services Group is the clearest example of this. Instead of building a crypto exchange, PNC uses Coinbase’s “Crypto-as-a-Service” stack.
The bank controls customer relationships, eligibility checks and reporting, while Coinbase provides trading and key management services behind the scenes.
Variations on that ‘white label’ structure are becoming the compromise for the industry. It lets banks say yes to customer demand without setting up their own wallet infrastructure or blockchain operations.
Additionally, recent guidance from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has clarified how national banks can treat crypto transactions as riskless principal transactions, where a bank buys from a liquidity provider and sells to a customer almost simultaneously.
That reduces capital damage from market risks and makes it easier to place Bitcoin desks next to currency or fixed income transactions.
Yet the attitude remains cautious. Banks start with their most sophisticated customers and with limited products.
For context, Charles Schwab and Morgan Stanley are targeting the first half of 2026 for spot trading of Bitcoin and Ethereum on self-directed platforms.
Yet they are expected to measure access with hard allocation limits, conservative margin rules and stricter eligibility criteria.
A regulatory stack
Underlying this shift is a regulatory and charter landscape that increasingly suits traditional institutions better than their upstart competitors.
The GENIUS Act created a federal framework for stablecoin issuers. The OCC has issued conditional national trust charters to crypto companies, creating a class of regulated counterparties that can fall within existing risk and capital regimes.
With that combination, banks can put together plug-and-play stacks. American Bancorp has done that revived its institutional Bitcoin custody service with NYDIG as sub-custodian.
Other major incumbents, including BNY Mellon, are building digital asset platforms aimed at institutions that prefer their Bitcoin to be owned by the same brands that protect government bonds and mutual funds.
For wealthy customers, the optics are important. Buying Bitcoin through a Morgan Stanley or Schwab interface, where positions appear in the same dashboards and overviews as other securities, feels fundamentally different than transferring funds to an offshore location.
So banks are using that trust and regulatory status to reposition cryptocurrency exchanges and infrastructure companies as back-end utilities rather than front-of-house brands.
As a result, the timetable for normalization has been compressed, but not immediate.
Bank of America plans to allow advisors from Merrill, the private bank, and Merrill Edge to recommend exchange-traded crypto products starting in January 2026.
This would shift Bitcoin from ‘unsolicited’ access to assets that can be housed in model portfolios, exposing them to the same allocation machinery that channels flows into stock and bond ETFs.
New sanitary facilities, new risk
The same architecture that makes it easier for banks to act quickly also brings new vulnerabilities.
Most institutions offering or planning crypto access do not build their own vaults. Instead, they rely on a small number of infrastructure providers, such as Coinbase, NYDIG, and Fireblocks, for execution, wallet technology, and key security.
That concentration creates a different kind of systemic risk. The risk-free main model and ETF wrappers limit the amount of market risk banks have to bear on their balance sheets.
However, they do not eliminate counterparty and operational risk.
Thus, a major outage, cyber incident, or enforcement action at a core sub-custodian would not only impact private crypto traders, but could also ripple through private banking divisions, institutional custodians, and model portfolios at multiple large institutions simultaneously.
When we consider this, banks are literally linking their own reputation and service levels to the resilience of suppliers that did not exist a decade ago.
Risk teams can try to mitigate this by pushing for modularity so that suppliers can be swapped, and by keeping early programs small relative to total assets.
But the direction is clear: a growing portion of Bitcoin exposure will be at the intersection of the asset platforms of major banks and a concentrated group of crypto specialists.
From pilot to standard offering
Despite the remaining risks, integration is moving forward.
U.S. Bancorp’s restart, PNC’s private banking business, Schwab and Morgan Stanley’s 2026 targets, Bank of America’s green light, and JPMorgan’s crypto embrace all point toward the same outcome: Bitcoin is woven into the operational fabric of mainstream finance rather than orbiting outside it.
None of this guarantees a smooth transition as BTC price volatility remains, policies could change, and a serious incident in the crypto infrastructure could delay or roll back parts of the roadmap.
However, if the current trajectory holds, the question facing many wealth clients in 2026 will be less about whether their bank offers Bitcoin at all and more about how their exposure is allocated between ETFs, direct investments and advisory models. It will also be about which institution they trust to sit between them and the rails below.
Banks may not have chosen Bitcoin as their innovation project of choice. They embrace it because their customers already have.
The pivot now underway is about building enough machinery around the asset to prevent those customers, and their balances, from drifting elsewhere permanently.
