I spoke with a bank executive this week about where the attention is going.
“AI is the only focus.”
That captures the mood. Crypto is in a bear market. The excitement has moved elsewhere.
But here’s one number that stopped me this week: 80 seconds.
That’s how long it took some of the world’s biggest banks to settle a cross-border payment in the BIS Project Agorá test. But what settled wasn’t a stablecoin. It was tokenized central bank reserves and bank deposits.
Here’s what matters, though: Banks aren’t chasing speed; they’re defending the deposit.
When money settles in a stablecoin, it leaves the balance sheet, and deposits are what fund the lending business. A tokenized deposit is the same dollar, still on the bank’s books, now programmable.
This week’s signals at a glance:
And 15+ more signals below.
One quick thing: last week, we launched the 51 Institutional Digital Asset Adoption Index. It ranks 103 financial institutions across eight capabilities using linked public evidence. If you want to see which banks are actually live—and which are still piloting—check it out at index.fiftyone.xyz.
Here is the state of play in Washington:
