



Bitcoin won’t replace banks. It could become their quiet reserve asset.
About the author: Emir Phillips is an associate professor of finance at Lincoln University. His research on central banking and the political economy has appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Economics and the Journal of Economic Issues.Nearly 20 years after Satoshi Nakamoto debuted Bitcoin as the ultimate banking disrupter, banks are still here. Central banks are bigger than ever.
Most people who own bitcoin do so through brokers, exchanges, or exchange-traded funds—not by running full nodes or buying groceries in sats.So Bitcoin hasn’t replaced banks, and it isn’t showing up at the cash register in the ways Nakamoto expected. But that doesn’t make it irrelevant for the financial industry. Commercial banks, and even central banks, are starting to embrace bitcoin at their deepest levels.
For investors, the key question isn’t when will everyone start spending bitcoin in retail settings. It is when banks, brokers, and clearing houses start relying on it under their hoods.U.S. Bancorp is reviving its bitcoin custody service for institutional clients after a three-year pause, encouraged by the Trump administration’s friendly regulatory stance and surging demand for spot bitcoin ETFs.
BNY is offering clients digital-asset custody. It is also tokenizing money-market funds with Goldman Sachs and others. In Europe, Deutsche Börse’s Clearstream is launching institutional bitcoin custody and settlement.Bitcoin will soon show up in treasury departments, collateral schedules, and regulatory rulebooks.
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