Banks Are Racing Onchain in 2026

Transcript

[applause] >> Morning everybody. Um, today we're going to be speaking about why banks are running on chain uh, in 2026. Um, and we're going to talk about what is working in production today and what's not. And uh, I'm Rodrigo, she mentioned the CEO of EigenNode. And we're going to talk about what changes when financial institutions actually move production workloads on chain and what infrastructure that requires.

So, most of the world's money still moves on software written in the 1970s and I just thought of this analogy this morning. You could think of it like we have streaming music today and imagine they were playing the music on record players to then get the music out to us. It really like is nonsensical. And institutions going on chain today is sort of the dial-up to broadband moment for those of you that were around for dial-up internet and how that worked. That's really how a lot of um, financial transactions happen behind the scenes today still. Um, and so in 2026, uh, all of these pilots that have been ongoing uh, in the past few years are moving into production and this is when institutional crypto uh, is moving

to production. As you've all heard, the New York Stock Exchange is working on 24/7 tokenized trading, tokenized assets are becoming collateral. Pilots are turning into production. Uh, independent moves all converging this year. And so we we ask, what is actually happening? And it's because of the regulatory clock is ticking. We've all heard about Genisys Act, Clarity Act. Uh, these hitting this year is really the the major movement of what is causing this to happen. So, before we get into it, just really quick about myself, I've spent eight years shipping production blockchain infrastructure from the first line of commit uh at The Graph infrastructure to running EdgeNode

today. We've served 1.8 trillion queries over our decentralized network and we've built the data layer that crypto runs on. So, now we're building the one that institutions need. And so, why now? We have the Genius Act that's coming on, MiCA, and you look uh across all these jurisdictions around the world, uh they're following suit. They're really looking to the United States as a leader and um seeing that as uh a need to keep pace uh to bring the world to uh similar similar um levels of formality. So, compliance frameworks have have moved from white papers to laws and the institutions that wait for

tooling are going to miss the window. It's created a sense of kind of FOMO, I guess, in in that uh institutions seeing um other banks racing to to bring this online, and so there's a a desire to keep pace and not lose market share, not lose uh the status in um their their statue in the world. So, stable co- We see that with stablecoins um all around the world um and specifically this year in January 27th with the Genius Act, uh this has been a forcing func- function for every regulated institution. So, that's roughly 7 months from today.

And we know that banks and institutions have a long procurement cycle, and so there is a sense of urgency uh here in 2026. Personally, I've traveled the globe for the last 8 months, uh been to conferences, speaking to hundreds of institutions around the world, and we're seeing this in every jurisdiction um that stablecoins, [clears throat] tokenization platforms, they're all being looked at, they're all being advanced rapidly because there is this sense of wanting to to set the stage as these regulations come online, and to be part of what's happening.

And so we're going to talk now about um what I've seen over the last 8 months in these conversations, and we're going to speak specifically about data and infrastructure, and what these institutions are thinking about and looking at. And so we're finding that banks are bringing the wrong assumptions on chain. So their data stacks were built for a world with finality, append-only ledgers, overnight batch windows, ACH transfers, wire transfers, and none of those really exist here.

So TradFi assumes reorgs are edge cases. So in the case of blockchains, reorgs are where the chain advances, and then you have to go backwards, and then follow a new chain. And this is something that happens commonly, and this is one of the issues in the the data side of blockchains that is not really thought about when people are thinking about moving their data on chain and using blockchains as a source of truth. Reorgs are actually normal. Um the the big data warehouses that are used today commonly, Snowflake, Postgres, BigQuery, there's a thought that those just work out of the box for on-chain data, and that's not the case.

Off-the-shelf tools don't work with on-chain data. Data accuracy is just assumed that it's a given with current on-chain solutions, and data isn't always accurate, and it's rarely crypto cryptographically verifiable. So when institutions um use the wrong tools, three things fail. One is data freshness, which means how recent the data is from the time it uh hits the blockchain and finalizes.

Auditability, meaning how you can track and trace it. And verifiability, meaning how can you verify the accuracy of the data, um the copy of the data that you're looking at that is coming off of the the underlying chain. So, the cost of getting this wrong, bad data puts capital at risk. So, stale collateral leads to blown liquidations, inaccurate balances lead to compliance violations, bad executions against uh bad state. Um and you really can't have inaccuracy uh when you're dealing with financial financial data and uh financial actions taken upon and relying upon that data.

And 24/7 markets aren't going to pause for you. I mean, uh we're moving at an extremely fast pace and um so, first movers compound their advantage and we're seeing that happen today. So, for institutional infrastructure, there's five really non-negotiables that are needed when it comes to data. You need sub-second data freshness. That's from block to query in under a second every time. You need verifiable cryptographic lineage. Uh you need multi-chain access because now we're seeing um assets and transactions happening across many different chains. Uh The Graph itself indexes over 90 chains.

Um so, you need a singular interface for that. You need an on-prem deployment option cuz we're seeing also in many jurisdictions that with regulations that um data sovereignty and and lineage is an important aspect. So, we're seeing that in the Middle East, Brazil, Japan, there are certain uh jurisdictions that require that of financial institutions. And SQL native, so this is a query language that's been around for decades that all data engineers speak. It's what AI speaks natively as well. So that is a requirement.

And so for institutions out there that happen to be listening, these are the questions that you should ask uh and it to evaluate every vendor. Number one is can you prove this data? Can you produce an audit trail or is this the sort of trust me, bro um aspect with the data? Today, a lot of data is being bought by uh from third-party companies that provide the data in bulk. And so you're relying upon that third party to to provide this accurate data and many times that's not there.

Um can the data be hosted on premise, managed, or both? Uh is it compliant on your genius under genius and Mika? And these are some red flags to look out for as well as you're evaluating vendors. So uh analysis served without the raw data lineage um that you cannot produce historical proofs on demand um which is highly important. And so this is why we at EdgeNode have built a product called AMP. It's a a blockchain data platform built for a financial institutions moving on chain.

It's SQL native. It's on-prem capable. Uh has verifiable extraction with full data lineage. It's a single API across 100 chains. It bridges into the existing data stack. And if you think about the holistic business um in a financial institution on the right side, you have off-chain data. So you have the existing stack of um infrastructure built for the traditional financial world. And then now we're bolting on all this on-chain stuff, stable coins, tokenization, you know, real-world assets, etc.

And say from a CFO perspective or an executive level to have a holistic view um of a 360 view of the business, really with you we're lacking the infrastructure on the on-chain side of things. Um and so this it will allow them to join on-chain off-chain data to then produce an analysis of the data. We just heard Farooq in the prior talk talking uh speaking about the lack of data in these financial institutions not having availability the data and so they think there is an activity happening.

Uh and so we need this infrastructure in place to make better decisions um because the data is fundamental to everything we're doing. So these are some production numbers uh measured at institutional scale on Amp. It's extremely fast, um 747 milliseconds for data freshness uh coming off-chain, 100 100 times improvement um over industry standard pipelines, 4,350 times faster backfills. This is uh reading in historical data.

2.3 times more storage efficient um than existing industry standard pipelines. Uh you can pay per query um or license the platform directly. Uh with option A, paper query, your cost scales linearly with with usage. Um you don't own the deployment or economics of it, and it's predictable for pilots but painful at production scale because your costs increase with consumption. Or you can license the platform where existing warehouse stays in Amp delivers the on-chain layer, so you have verifiable fresh SQL native data.

Um you can run on premise or inside your security perimeter. Uh it's a flat license fee, predictable at any scale. And so you own the deployment, the data that economics. And at scale at institutions, this matters a lot. And so with Amp, compliance becomes provable. And this is where um it matters. So with stablecoins, some use cases we have uh reserve attestations, compliance, so automated regulatory reporting. Uh for markets, 24/7 trading pipelines.

Um and your existing stack stays in place and Amp delivers the on-chain layer. So the takeaway is that banks are coming on chain. Uh existing tools weren't built for it. And Amp was really built for um tokenized deposits, whereas as the existing systems were were designed for ACH and older systems. So you have verifiable real-time blockchain analytics and compliance data, which Amp delivers. And the institutions moving online now will own the deck next decade of financial infrastructure.

And so here's what I tell every institutional CTO when I'm out on the road and having these meetings. Um so scaled consumption punishes you for your success, whereas Amp rewards you. So as I mentioned, uh if you're buying in bulk, um as your business grows, as your needs grow, uh your costs are increasing uh when you're on a pay-per-query model or a pay-per-data model. And Amp delivers uh white glove deployments on premise. Um and verifiability is table stakes. And so uh Amp delivers cryptographic proof that the data that is sitting in your cloud environment and your copy of your database cryptographically matches

what's on chain and is 100% complete and accurate. So, the future of finance is multi-chain. And the infrastructure choices made now determine who scales the next decade. We're seeing this happen in 2026. There's a race today to keep pace with innovation to bring existing rails to blockchain rails. And these procurement cycles take time. And so, with the onset of this regular regulatory clarity the tables being set as far as who the leaders are going to be as we race into this next decade. And we're seeing firsthand that um

these choices, who the vendors are going to be, what infrastructure stacks are in place, are going to be extremely important for who leads the way. And as mentioned before many of the the people in financial institutions aren't really blockchain native. And so, they are coming from the traditional finance world. We're seeing a lot of roles coming online for heads of digital assets. They're looking for people that have come from crypto themselves to move into traditional finance. And they really need help navigating this new world.

And so, with us we offer consulting services to help navigate the space because there's so many vendors. Who do you choose? Who's the best? What's the best tool for this particular um need? And so, I I can see that there's a big challenge before financial institutions. And so, there is pressure. It's coming from the top down. But it's a really exciting time. We're really building the the new way of how the $750 trillion global market of transactions happening will work.

Today when we think about sending like a Zelle payment or a Venmo payment, we don't think about what happens kind of behind the scenes. It goes into this black box. And so again, it's we're running on decades-old systems. And tomorrow we'll hit send. It'll still be invisible to us. But it'll run on blockchain rails. And so and the data infrastructure that we provide, what others are providing out there are sort of the plumbing and infrastructure behind of what makes it all work. And that's why we're here. We're helping usher this future along.

And it's really exciting to be part of it. So thank you all for your time today. Hope you enjoy the rest of conference. >> [applause]