In today’s edition, we take you behind the scenes of:

Onchain treasury: Some of our most recent conversations with financial institutions indicate that interest in stablecoin-based treasury management is growing. The momentum is driven by broader adoption of stablecoins as a payment rail, the emergence of regulatory frameworks in both Europe and the U.S., and the rise of complementary products like tokenized money market funds, a topic we covered in depth last week with WisdomTree.

New competition from outside: Until now, development for onchain corporate treasury solutions has been largely driven by major banks like JPMorgan, Citi, and HSBC through their respective tokenized deposit solutions and private networks. What’s changing is that the market is now getting tackled from the other direction, too: an increasing number of crypto-native companies are building stablecoin-based treasury solutions and selling upstream into enterprises.

The build-out is accelerating: In just the past weeks, a string of announcements has underlined the growing commercial interest:

Industry perspectives: To better understand where adoption stands today and what is still missing, we spoke with three players approaching the market from different angles.

Jérôme Prigent is Managing Director Europe at BCB Group, a regulated payments and trading infrastructure provider serving both traditional and digital asset firms. Its core clients include exchanges, market makers, and OTC desks. One of its flagship products is BLINC, a 24/7 fiat settlement network that also supports stablecoins.

Traditional institutions are beginning to explore onchain treasury use cases, but adoption remains at an early stage, with significant education still needed across the market. So far, blockchain is primarily being used for specific verticals rather than as core treasury infrastructure: stablecoins for cross-border payments and intercompany transfers, tokenized money market funds for deploying excess liquidity, and onchain lending markets for short-term capital deployment.

The challenge is that these capabilities remain highly fragmented. They are offered by different platforms, built on different infrastructures, and rarely integrated into a single operational environment. Treasury teams cannot yet manage liquidity, payments, and investments through a unified onchain stack, and integrating what exists into ERP systems, accounting infrastructure, and compliance frameworks remains genuinely difficult.

What the market still lacks is a full stack: institutional-grade custody, fiat on- and off-ramps, stablecoin payment rails, access to short-term liquidity markets, and integration with tokenized investment products. The technology exists. The components don’t yet talk to each other.

Vassilis Tziokas is Vice President of Ecosystem Growth at Matter Labs, the firm behind ZKsync's Prividium, a Ethereum Layer-2 infrastructure solution purpose-built for financial institutions. Matter Labs is currently supporting pilot initiatives with multiple banks across the United States and Europe.

The first set of questions is always the same: privacy, compliance, and sovereignty over the infrastructure. Can anyone see our transaction flows? Does this meet our regulatory requirements? Are we dependent on a network owned by a potential competitor?

What becomes more interesting is what comes up in the third, fourth, or fifth conversation. Two questions tend to emerge consistently. The first is integration: no institution is going to rip out its SAP or Oracle systems just to run treasury on a blockchain. Onchain infrastructure needs to plug into existing systems, ERPs, accounting platforms, and compliance frameworks.

The second question is: who is actually going to build this for us? There is no bank or multinational with the internal engineering capacity to deploy this kind of infrastructure on its own. That gap between interest and execution is probably one of the most underestimated obstacles in this market today.

Paul-Adrien Hyppolite is the co-founder and CEO of Spiko, a Paris-based startup operating the largest euro-denominated tokenized money market fund (EUTBL) deployed on permissionless infrastructure, with more than €800 million subscribed. In January, the company secured a MiFID investment firm license, enabling it to passport its services across the European Economic Area (EEA).

First, these solutions are particularly valuable for SMEs, which typically have far more limited access to sophisticated treasury services than large multinational corporations. While large companies benefit from dedicated banking relationships and advanced liquidity management tools, smaller firms often rely on much simpler, and often less efficient, financial infrastructure.

Onchain solutions can help bridge that gap. By automating payments, improving liquidity management and yield optimization through programmable financial infrastructure, blockchain can give SMEs access to capabilities that were traditionally reserved for large institutions.

This is already what we see in practice. The majority of our clients today are SMEs that may not even realize they are using blockchain infrastructure. They simply experience a more efficient financial product, even though the underlying infrastructure is onchain.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Disclaimer: The information provided in the Institutional Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.