Traditional banking has its rules and clients, but there are two starting points from which you can smell a one-way strategy. I’m not talking about banks in the sense of traditional banking anymore, but rather about banks with licenses, regulated, and offering all kinds of cryptocurrencies to their customers.

The idea here is simple: exchanges—every cryptocurrency exchange—will become banks. Between an exchange and a traditional bank there’s only one difference: the banking license. To make it much clearer, let’s see what each one does, and we’ll start with a timeline that was broken by MicroStrategy. A before and after has been marked on Wall Street; we all see it, but few actually notice it.

I remember August 11, 2020, when MicroStrategy announced something that changed the landscape forever: they would begin adopting bitcoin as part of their treasury assets. A move that didn’t trigger many alarms at the time, since we were in the middle of “coronahysteria” (COVID-19), but it did raise some eyebrows. Another financial act that went almost unnoticed back then was when the OCC in the United States issued interpretive letters allowing U.S. banks to hold cryptocurrency reserves—a simple but powerful wink.

That same year, before it ended, Kraken achieved a Pyrrhic victory: a special banking license that allowed it to offer customers accounts, asset custody, and operations under state regulation. Imagine, from zero to operating something that looked like a fully reserved bank.

And so, banks began falling under the spell of cryptocurrencies: Itaú Unibanco in 2022, Commerzbank in 2023, BBVA Spain in 2025. These moves are not isolated events—they are crystal-clear steps toward integrating cryptocurrencies into the banking sector, achieving what they have long sought: asset tokenization.

And take note, these are moves from the traditional markets. Bitfinex is also looking to participate directly in this market. Its first attempt came when Bitfinex Securities obtained a license (2022) to launch a regulated market for tokenized securities (2024) in El Salvador, with the aim of issuing the famous volcano bonds.

Where does this come from?

In 2022, the Bank for International Settlements issued a paper recommending that banks step aside unless they applied a 1,250% risk weight to unbacked assets. In simpler terms: do it, but you’ll pay dearly for it.

The EU issued the famous MiCA regulation, which began to apply primarily to stablecoins; the UK also introduced its own rules, and Brazil did the same in 2022 through proof-of-reserve and audit requirements. The plan? To corner exchanges and force them to evolve with capital requirements, risk management, and equity—that is, to become a bank.

I’m not putting on a tin foil hat here, because I’m actually seeing exchanges adopting banking licenses, and those that aren’t are forming partnerships. So, let’s see:

So then…

We started with the ideal of living without banks, and today the same exchanges—once the viable alternative to banks—are seeking to adopt the structures and rules of a bank. What was supposed to be displaced is now firmly in our territory. It’s a sort of DNA swap, where banks learn to be flexible and exchanges learn to navigate regulation. Today, talking about exchanges versus banks… no longer makes sense. Today, we know that bitcoin is an alternative, and we also have decentralized exchanges where this path may remain unmarked.

This is a thinking in progress...