For years, the relationship between traditional banking and Bitcoin was defined by skepticism, if not outright hostility. At this point, there can’t be any denying that the Bitcoin price has broken into the next price bracket of $89,000 with a total global crypto market cap holding over $3 trillion. A new analysis by River reveals that 60% of the 25 largest U.S. banks are now offering, launching, or exploring Bitcoin products, marking a pragmatic pivot that brings digital assets closer to the center of the American financial system.
According to the River tally released Tuesday, 15 of the nation’s top 25 financial institutions have moved beyond the “wait and see” phase. They are actively building custody solutions, trading desks, or lending products, signaling that crypto access is no longer the domain of niche exchanges but a standard menu item for modern wealth management.
The Institutional Heavyweights Enter the Ring
The shift is perhaps best illustrated by PNC Bank, the seventh-largest bank in the United States. In a move that would have been unthinkable just two years ago, PNC recently launched direct Bitcoin access for eligible Private Bank clients. Utilizing Coinbase’s “Crypto as a Service” infrastructure, the bank now allows clients to buy, hold, and sell Bitcoin directly through their existing banking interface.
“As client interest in digital assets continues to grow, our responsibility is to offer secure and well-designed options,” said PNC Chief Executive Bill Demchak. His statement reflects a broader realization among executives: if banks don’t offer these services, their customers will simply move their money to fintech competitors who do.
Also, U.S. Bank is showing increased confidence in its participation in the cryptocurrency space again. U.S. Bank announced on September 3, 2025, that it will be providing (again) cryptocurrency custody services for institutional investment managers. U.S. Bank cites increased regulatory clarity and substantial demand for these services from fund managers as reasons for the resumption in the offering of these services. U.S. Bank is focusing on providing a stronghold for digital assets, including providing the thorough and independent audits of the digital asset custodial accounts along with a segregated pool of digital assets (by client) on behalf of its institutional clients.
A Regulatory Thaw in 2025
In March 2025, an important change took place in Washington that allowed for a revival of banking buildouts, which had been frozen by a regulatory winter in the past few years. Those buildouts began moving forward when Federal regulators provided banks with the green light for responsible innovation.
The crucial turning point took place when the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued Interpretive Letter 1183, which stated that national banks can engage in crypto-asset custody and stablecoin activities, as long as they have appropriate controls in place. The most important aspect of Interpretive Letter 1183 was its rescinding of former guidance and the requirement of a lengthy “non-objection” process, which had created a de facto moratorium on banks having the ability to offer these products.
Simultaneously with that event, the FDIC rescinded a letter from 2022 that had similarly prevented state-chartered banks from engaging in these activities. With this change to a regulatory model that offered banks the opportunity for innovation without prior permission, banks’ product teams began moving from theoretical pilots to live deployments.
Defining “Bitcoin Products”
There are many different kinds of “Bitcoin products” that will suit each user differently when trying to purchase bitcoin from their retail payment provider accounts. River’s research shows that when a provider offers Bitcoin, it can mean many different things for each client type.
Custody: Safekeeping of an asset in the back office; basically the same as putting something in a digital safe, and is directed primarily toward either an institution with a large sum of money or a wealthy individual wanting to secure a large sum of money in digital assets.
Trading Access: This type of access is similar to a broker-type style where a provider sends an order to a partner; i.e., Coinbase, NYDIG, etc., rather than keeping bitcoin on its own company’s books. These transactions are usually by way of an “agent model”, allowing banks to take fees from these transactions while transferring liability to their partner(s).
Lending: The most profitable of all the different types of bitcoin products is the lending process that uses bitcoin as collateral to borrow U.S. dollars. There is a huge amount of value here, especially for wealthy bitcoin owners, who can use their bitcoin collateral to gain access to liquidity without generating any tax liabilities from selling their bitcoin.
The “DeFi Mullet” Strategy
What is emerging is a pragmatic hybrid model. Instead of having to completely transform their legacy systems to support blockchain-based transactions, traditional banks are collaborating with crypto-native companies—a strategy that is affectionately referred to as the “DeFi mullet” (financial technology on the front, decentralized financial protocols on the back). By utilizing the services of partners to perform the heavy lifting of trade execution and custody, banks can concentrate on doing what they do best—compliance, risk management, and developing customer relationships, while also remaining insulated from the “wild west” aspects of crypto, and thereby still capturing all revenues from this asset class.
Looking Ahead: The Race for the Mass Market
While current offerings are largely gated by account size and geography—PNC’s rollout, for example, is focused on private bank clients—the trend line is clear. As infrastructure matures and banks grow comfortable with the risk controls, these services are likely to trickle down to mass-market retail apps.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, fresh from the World Economic Forum in Davos, noted that for many banking CEOs, crypto has evolved from a nuisance to an “existential” priority. With 60% of the top players now in the game, the question for the remaining 40% is no longer if they will adopt Bitcoin, but how quickly they can catch up.
