New B2B revenue lines: how banks earn from giving DeFi access to institutional capital and users

Most discussion of bank participation in DeFi has been framed as a defensive question, with banks asked whether they need to respond to stablecoins, tokenised assets, and onchain settlement before those rails start moving customer activity off the bank's books. That framing misses the more interesting half of the trade. Banks hold the institutional capital and the customer relationships, while DeFi holds the programmability and the global rails. There has not been an architecture that lets the two sides meet without one of them compromising the controls that make it work. The Rayls Public Chain is built to be that architecture, with the Rayls Privacy Node serving as the bank-side gateway and the public chain serving as the distribution venue.

To give this some scale, TradFi accounts for roughly $100T in liquidity and 6.2 billion users globally, while DeFi today reaches around $3T in liquidity and 300 million users. It’s clear, therefore, that scale will come from bringing institutional capital, users and operations onchain.

The first movers are already in the market.

• Stripe: stablecoin infrastructure acquired through Bridge in October 2024, wallet and onboarding infrastructure acquired through Privy in 2025, with Stripe's own Tempo chain now live. A fintech that already connects with all the banks is assembling the full onchain stack in-house.
• Standard Chartered: recent acquisition of Zodia Custody, bringing institutional crypto custody inside a tier-one bank rather than partnering for it externally.
• Société Générale FORGE: regulated digital asset issuance arm with EURCV and USDCV stablecoins live on public chains, run from inside a major European bank.
• Visa: stablecoin settlement work including the Bridge integration, putting stablecoin rails through Visa's established B2B infrastructure.

The pattern is consistent across each of these moves. Fintechs and banks are absorbing the components needed to participate in onchain markets, and the ones moving fastest are doing it by acquisition rather than greenfield build. The institutional customer base, the regulatory posture, and the existing distribution channels are the hard parts to build, while the onchain components can be bought or quickly built using common standards. What has been missing is a chain architecture that lets a bank or fintech bring its existing customer base into onchain markets without surrendering the controls those customers require.

Three new B2B revenue lines for banks

The Rayls Public Chain opens up three direct B2B revenue lines for banks and fintechs operating a Privacy Node.

1. Distribution. Banks issuing tokenised assets inside their Privacy Node can compliantly unlock liquidity when those assets are distributed across the Public Chain. The bank is the gateway between a private institutional venue and a global secondary market, and this secure gateway is the key to connecting traditional finance with decentralised finance in a way that makes sense for a bank - they control both ends of their own private bridge. McKinsey projects that tokenised yield-bearing assets will grow from $24B today to $4T by 2030 at 176% annual growth, and the institutions positioned at the gateway will capture distribution revenue against that flow.
2. Liquidity provision. As tokenised assets and stablecoins flow onto the Public Chain, the deepest liquidity will sit with the institutions that hold the underlying. Banks providing two-way liquidity into vaults, automated market makers, and orderbook venues earn the spread and the inventory carry, and the underlying capital is already on their balance sheet. The scale anchor is the stablecoin market, which Citi projects will grow from $275B today to $3.7T by 2030 at 65% annually.
3. Privacy Node fee conversion to Public Chain. Institutions paying transaction fees in fiat through the Rayls Foundation OTC partner route create a B2B revenue line for the OTC counterparties handling the fiat-to-USDr-to-RLS conversion. For banks and fintechs with FX and treasury infrastructure already in place, this is a low-effort, scalable revenue line that grows with overall network activity.

These three revenue lines are all native to the Privacy Node and Public Chain architecture, and they all attach to flows that the bank already controls.

Why fintechs are best placed to move first

Fintechs hold a structural advantage in capturing this opportunity. They already understand the institutional buyer because they have served banks for years, and they know the operating procedures, the procurement cycles, the compliance posture, and the integration constraints that determine whether a deal closes. Adding the DeFi component to an existing fintech is an extension of the product surface rather than a new company, and acquiring the missing pieces is generally faster and cheaper than building them from scratch.

The Stripe pattern is the cleanest example. Bridge gave Stripe stablecoin issuance and settlement infrastructure, Privy gave Stripe wallets and consumer onboarding, and Tempo gives Stripe a chain it controls. Each acquisition slotted into a base that already had millions of merchant relationships and a regulated payments backbone, with each step buying speed rather than reinventing the underlying capability. Standard Chartered's Zodia Custody acquisition is the bank version of the same logic, and Visa's Bridge integration shows it again from a payments network angle. In each case, the acquirer brought the institutional customer base and the regulatory standing, and bought in the onchain components.

The same logic applies to a fintech or bank operating a Rayls Privacy Node, with the Rayls Public Chain providing the public distribution venue and the three revenue lines above attaching directly to the flow.

The flip side of the trade: what DeFi gets

The bank-side opportunity has a counterpart on the DeFi side, and both sides need to be in place for the trade to work.

1. Net new capital. Institutional capital has largely been absent from public chains because the controls institutions require have been absent too. The Privacy Node gateway resolves that constraint, so the capital now has a route to onchain markets that respects the rules under which it operates.
2. Net new users. Institutional users are KYC'd, suitability-assessed, and operationally ready to transact at scale. For DeFi protocols, this is a higher-quality user base than retail-only, with larger transaction sizes and lower customer acquisition cost per dollar deployed.

The two sides reinforce each other. As more institutional capital arrives, DeFi protocols build products designed for that capital, which in turn creates more demand for the bank-side services described above.

How it works end-to-end: the XP example

XP Inc. is Brazil's largest investment platform, with around $400B in client assets. On 12 March 2026, XP launched USDXP onto Rayls. This is a fully USD-backed stablecoin, through Clear Corretora on the Rayls Privacy Node, with $300M issued in the first week of launch. The next step will be to connect this privately issued stablecoin with the Rayls public chain for global accessibility and FX with other major stablecoins (e.g. USDT / USDC).

The full flow runs as follows:

1. Private issuance. USDXP is issued inside the XP-operated Privacy Node, under XP's existing custody, identity, and compliance controls. The internal venue is private to XP and its Clear Corretora customer base.
2. Private trading. Internal flow happens inside the Privacy Node, with all the controls XP needs for its retail and institutional customers, and without exposing the activity to a public chain.
3. Public distribution. When USDXP needs to reach a broader market, including DeFi-native participants and suitable retail investors elsewhere, the asset is bridged via the private-public bridge to the Rayls Public Chain.
4. Public composability. On the Public Chain, USDXP becomes a programmable asset, available to DeFi protocols, vaults, and AMMs that can integrate it into yield products, payment flows, and other onchain applications.

The same shape can be applied to any institution issuing a tokenised asset, with the specifics changing while the architecture stays constant.

Closing

The institutional onchain market has been waiting for an architecture that lets banks and fintechs participate without surrendering the controls their customers require. The Rayls Public Chain is that architecture, with the Privacy Node providing the bank-side gateway, the Public Chain providing the distribution venue, and three direct revenue lines attached to the flow between them. Banks and fintechs that move now gain a first mover advantage before the flow becomes large enough to attract competitive entry, while DeFi protocols that integrate now access a category of capital and users that has not been available to them before. Both sides benefit, and the architecture is what makes the trade work at all.

‍

In our next post we will move from this commercial argument into the broader vision of bank adoption, and what it looks like when a bank holds crypto exposure, runs dApp access for its customers, and supports global account-to-account transactions on the same rails.

‍