Last year restored crypto’s institutional footing. This year, according to Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), is when it becomes more integrated into the financial system.

Regulatory clarity improved in 2025, institutional engagement accelerated and capital markets reopened. Now the focus is shifting from price cycles to infrastructure as digital assets become more deeply embedded into payments, custody, treasury management and capital markets.

“Regardless of how tangible or visible, all the forces shaping crypto today share a common thread: Crypto is moving from expectations to production. Pilot programs are scaling and capital is consolidating,” Anthony Vassallo, senior vice president of crypto at SVB, told CoinDesk in an interview.

The bank, which maintains more than 500 relationships with crypto companies and venture firms investing in the sector, says institutional capital, consolidation, stablecoins, tokenization and AI are converging to reshape how money moves.

After its 2023 collapse, SVB was bought by North Carolina–based First Citizens Bank and now operates within a top-20 U.S. bank with $230 billion in assets. In 2025, it added 2,100 clients and ended the year with $108 billion in total client funds and $44 billion in loans.

Fewer experiments, more conviction

“The suits and ties have arrived,” according to the bank’s 2026 outlook report.

Venture funding in U.S. crypto companies rose 44% last year to $7.9 billion, according to PitchBook data cited by SVB. While the deal count fell, median check sizes climbed to $5 million as investors concentrated capital into stronger teams. Seed valuations jumped 70% from 2023 levels.

The bank warns that demand for institutional-grade crypto companies could outstrip the number of investable firms.

“In 2026, conditions are ripe for continued growth in VC investment in crypto. As institutional adoption accelerates, driving larger venture capital checks, we expect continued capital concentration in fewer companies with investors prioritizing higher-quality projects and follow-ons into proven teams,” Vassallo said.

“For end users, the result will be a more seamless experience across everyday financial interactions, from sending cross-border payments to managing an investment portfolio.”

Corporate balance sheets are reinforcing the shift. At least 172 public companies held bitcoin BTC$67,969.33 in the third quarter of 2025, up 40% from the second, collectively controlling roughly 5% of circulating supply, according to data referenced by SVB.

A new class of digital asset treasury companies, firms that treat crypto accumulation as a core strategy, has emerged. The bank expects consolidation as standards tighten and volatility tests business models.

Meanwhile, traditional banks are moving deeper into the sector. JPMorgan, the largest U.S. bank by assets, plans to accept bitcoin and ether ETH$1,980.82 as collateral, Bloomberg reported last year. SoFi Technologies offers direct digital asset trading. U.S. Bank provides custody through NYDIG. SVB expects more institutions to roll out lending, custody and settlement products as compliance guardrails solidify.

M&A and the race to full-stack crypto

Why build when you can buy?

More than 140 venture capital-backed crypto companies were acquired in the four quarters ending in September, a 59% year-over-year jump, according to the bank’s analysis of PitchBook data. Coinbase’s $2.9 billion acquisition of Deribit and Kraken’s $1.5 billion purchase of NinjaTrader underscored the scale.

The trend extends to banking charters. In 2025, 18 companies applied for charters from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), most of them blockchain-enabled firms. The OCC granted conditional approval to digital-asset-focused trust banks including custody provider BitGo (BTGO), Circle Internet (CRCL), the company behind the second-largest stablecoin, trading platform Fidelity Digital Assets, stablecoin issuer Paxos and payments network Ripple.

For SVB, that marks a turning point: stablecoin and custody infrastructure moving inside the federal banking perimeter. The bank expects traditional financial institutions to accelerate dealmaking rather than risk being disrupted by vertically integrated crypto-native rivals.

“We expect M&A to set a record again in 2026. As digital asset capabilities
become table stakes for financial services, companies will focus on acquisition strategies instead of building products from scratch,” Vassallo says.

“To meet market demands ranging from stablecoin capabilities to full-stack crypto banks, exchanges, custodians, infrastructure providers and brokerages will consolidate into multiproduct companies,” he said.

Stablecoins become the ‘internet’s dollar’

Stablecoins, SVB said, are evolving from trading tools into digital cash.

With near-instant settlement and lower transaction costs than interbank transfer system ACH or card networks, dollar-backed tokens are attractive for treasury operations, cross-border payments and business-to-business settlement.

Regulatory clarity is accelerating adoption. The U.S. GENIUS Act, passed in July, established federal standards for stablecoin issuance, including 1:1 reserve backing and monthly disclosures. Similar frameworks are in place in the EU, U.K., Singapore and the UAE.

Beginning in 2027, only permitted entities such as banks or approved nonbanks will be allowed to issue compliant stablecoins in the U.S. SVB expects issuers to spend 2026 aligning products with federal oversight.

Banks are already experimenting. Société Générale introduced a euro stablecoin. JPMorgan expanded JPM Coin to public blockchains. A group including PNC, Citi and Wells Fargo is exploring a joint token initiative.

Venture dollars are following. Investment in stablecoin-focused companies surged to more than $1.5 billion in 2025, up from less than $50 million in 2019, according to SVB.

In 2026, the bank expects tokenized dollars to move into core enterprise systems, embedded in treasury workflows, collateral management and programmable payments.

Tokenization and AI

Real-world asset tokenization is scaling. Onchain representations of cash, Treasuries and money-market instruments exceeded $36 billion in 2025, according to data cited by the bank.

Funds from BlackRock (BLK) and Franklin Templeton have amassed hundreds of millions in assets, settling flows directly onchain. ETF issuers and asset managers are testing blockchain-based wrappers to reduce transfer costs and enable intraday settlement. Robinhood (HOOD) now has tokenized stock exposure for European users and plans U.S. expansion.

SVB sees private and public markets converging on shared settlement rails, with tokenization expanding beyond Treasuries into private markets and consumer-facing applications.

Then there’s the convergence with AI. In 2025, 40 cents of every venture dollar invested in crypto went to companies also building AI products, up from 18 cents the year prior, according to SVB’s analysis. Startups are building agent-to-agent commerce protocols, and major blockchains are integrating AI into wallets.

Autonomous agents capable of transacting in stablecoins could enable machines to negotiate and settle payments without human intervention. Blockchain-based provenance and verification tools are being developed to address AI’s trust deficit.

The consumer impact may be subtle. SVB predicts that next year’s breakout apps won’t brand themselves as crypto. They will look like fintech products, with stablecoin settlement, tokenized assets and AI agents operating quietly in the background.

From expectation to infrastructure

Silicon Valley Bank’s overarching message is to treat crypto as infrastructure.

Pilot programs are scaling. Capital is concentrating. Banks are entering. Regulators are defining the perimeter. Blockchain technology is poised to underpin treasury operations, collateral flows, cross-border payments and parts of capital markets.

Volatility will remain, and headlines will continue to move prices. But the deeper narrative, the bank argues, is about the plumbing.

“In 2025, momentum in onchain representations of cash, treasuries and money market instruments carried real-world assets into the financial mainstream,” Vassallo said. “This year, cryptocurrency will be treated as infrastructure.”

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Policymakers across North America are worrying about what the energy usage of crypto, artificial intelligence and other data centers might mean for the affordability of regular customers, but crypto investment firm Paradigm argues that the government should leave bitcoin mining operations out of it.

Mining bitcoin does take a tremendous amount of electricity. But the business model only works when that energy is particularly cheap — such as when it’s provided by off-peak renewable sources — and can be given back at the times when it’s most needed by the public, according to a report produced by Paradigm, which has miner Genesis Digital Assets in its investment portfolio.

The report, viewed by CoinDesk, disputes widely shared claims about bitcoin mining’s energy use and waste issues by citing data that the sector actually uses about 0.23% of global energy and emits about 0.08% of the carbon. And the miners have to operate under a “break even price” per megawatt hour of electricity to enable profits.

“This means that by its very nature, Bitcoin mining counter-balances the bulk of the average community’s energy consumption, bringing equilibrium to the grid — not strain,” according to the report compiled by Justin Slaughter, vice president for regulatory affairs at Paradigm, and Veronica Irwin. “It is, in a word, bringing balance to our energy force.”

Federal and state policy efforts are beginning to pile up that would seek to restrict data centers and digital mining operations, which could arguably fit under the “data center” definition in U.S. law. On Thursday, U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, and Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, introduced a bill to stop data centers from pushing up electricity costs for consumers, though the legislative text doesn’t explicitly mention bitcoin or crypto. New York state lawmakers have similarly been pursuing a data-center moratorium.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptomining are fueling a rising demand for energy driven by massive, energy-intensive data centers,” several Democratic U.S. senators wrote in a November letter to the chief of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that asked for “immediate action” to protect consumers.

In Canada, British Columbia said in October it planned to halt new crypto mining operations from its energy grid.

The Paradigm report countered, “Bitcoin miners who use energy that would otherwise go to waste, or who participate in state-led programs to give energy control agencies more control over the grid, should be rewarded for their good behavior.”

The Harvard Management Company, which manages the eponymous university’s endowment, has reduced its stake in BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund and opened a new position in the asset management company’s Ether ETF.

In a Friday filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Harvard’s endowment reported that it had reduced its position in the BlackRock iShares Bitcoin (BTC) Trust ETF to $265.8 million as of Dec. 31 from $442.9 million in Q3 2025. The investments marked the company offloading more than 3 million shares of the ETF, to 5.4 million in Q4 from 6.8 million in Q3.

In addition to the 21% reduction in its Bitcoin position, the Harvard Management Company reported a new investment with exposure to Ether (ETH). According to the SEC filing, the endowment purchased more than 3.8 million shares of BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust, valued at about $87 million as of Dec. 31. 

The portfolio managers’ decisions occurred during a period of significant price volatility for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The price of BTC dropped to less than $90,000 by January 2026 from more than $120,000 at the beginning of July 2025, while Ether dropped to under $3,000 from more than $4,000 in the same period.

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As of June 30, 2025, Harvard reported that its endowment stood at $56.9 billion, making its investments in the BlackRock crypto ETFs 0.62% of the total assets under management. The company similarly increased its position in Google’s parent Alphabet by almost $100 million, while reducing its stake in Amazon by about $80 million in Q4 2025.

AI hedge fund backed by “top university endowments”

Harvard’s moves come as Numerai, an AI hedge fund, reported in November that it had raised $30 million in a funding round led by “top university endowments,” which the AI hedge fund described as “the smartest, most long-term allocators in the world,” without identifying specific endowments. However, the announcement pushed the price of its native NMR token up by more than 40%.