"On a cold Monday evening in December 2025, a corporate treasurer walked into a standing meeting with a request: "Can we settle this cross-border payment tonight instead of tomorrow?" In any other year preceding 2025, the answer would've been a polite laugh. Settlement calendars have been carved into the industry's muscle memory for decades: markets open, markets close, and money moves when the banking system says so. But in 2025, something structurally significant had changed."
"In the blur of AI news cycles and political discourse throughout 2025, crypto staged a comeback; not in meme tokens or speculative blow-ups, but as experimental infrastructure for treasury, payments, and cash flow. In this piece, we examine how a small but growing group of banks began engaging more actively with crypto following its resurgence - and what that shift may signal for the future of institutional money movement. By the end of 2025, three narratives had come together:"
On a cold December evening in 2025 a corporate treasurer requested same-night settlement for a cross-border payment and received approval via stablecoin settlement. Crypto matured into experimental infrastructure for treasury, payments, and cash flow amid 2025's AI and political noise. A small but growing group of banks began issuing deposit tokens and settling transactions on public blockchains. A regulatory framework for stablecoins emerged under the GENIUS Act. Treasurers adopted tokenized instruments for real settlement, liquidity management, and global payments. Adoption remained uneven and early, but these shifts signaled movement toward a more controlled, mainstream, institution-friendly phase.
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