The overlap between traditional finance and cryptocurrencies has become more pronounced in the last few years, with some online crypto services offering Visa-backed cards supporting crypto payments. However, the infrastructure gap between traditional banking and crypto is barely narrowing.
Banks are generally much slower to adopt innovative technologies due to their complex and strict regulatory environment. Management consulting firm McKinsey found that bank IT applications are older than average across industries, indicating sluggish change.
When it comes to crypto adoption, banks are even more hesitant, as digital assets rely on decentralized infrastructure while many jurisdictions still cannot propose clear regulations.
Many traditional banks stay away from crypto either because they don’t want to be associated with risky and unregulated assets or because of the tight oversight from financial watchdogs.
In the U.S., the Federal Reserve warned member banks in February 2023 that it would ban a large portion of crypto banking activity, citing increasing fraud cases. Meanwhile, it denied crypto-focused Custodia Bank to become a Fed member.
In August, the Fed developed a new supervision program to oversee the banks engaging with crypto.
In the UK, JPMorgan’s British retail bank Chase announced in September that it would ban crypto transactions from clients, also citing an increase in fraud and scams.
The fact that traditional banks actively stay away from integrating crypto operations hinders adoption, making it more difficult for non-tech-savvy consumers to benefit from the power of Web3 and decentralization. Centralized (CEXs) and decentralized (DEXs) exchanges are an alternative, but they are too complex and have a limited
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