Incumbents folding in crypto rails
Mainstream financial firms are quietly integrating crypto into consumer and payments rails: Morgan Stanley is reportedly preparing to offer retail crypto trading on E*Trade for bitcoin, ether and solana, while Visa, American Express and JPMorgan are already processing or enabling crypto‑adjacent flows. These moves were reported alongside broader industry notes about incumbents incorporating stablecoin and exchange plumbing ( ).
Morgan Stanley is preparing to let E*Trade customers trade bitcoin, ether and solana in the first half of 2026 through crypto infrastructure firm Zerohash. (cnbc.com) Morgan Stanley wealth chief Jed Finn said in a September 23, 2025 memo that the firm was “well underway” on the partner-model launch, and a Morgan Stanley spokesperson told Reuters the initial lineup would include those three tokens. (cnbc.com, investing.com) Visa is already moving stablecoins on its own network. On December 16, 2025, the company said United States issuer and acquirer partners could settle with Visa in Circle’s USDC, and said its stablecoin settlement volume had reached a $3.5 billion annualized run rate as of November 30. (visa.com) American Express has taken a consumer route instead of a settlement one. Coinbase said on June 12, 2025 that its Coinbase One Card would launch on the American Express network in the United States and offer up to 4% bitcoin back on purchases. (americanexpress.com, coinbase.com) JPMorgan has been building the back-end version of the same shift. Its Kinexys blockchain unit said in November 2024 that the platform had processed more than $1.5 trillion in notional value since inception and was averaging more than $2 billion a day. (jpmorgan.com) Banks and card networks are not offering the same crypto product to the same customer. E*Trade is lining up spot token trading for retail brokerage accounts, while Visa and JPMorgan are using blockchains as plumbing for settlement, treasury movement and cross-border transfers. (cnbc.com, visa.com, jpmorgan.com) Stablecoins are the piece making that plumbing useful to incumbents. They are digital tokens designed to hold a fixed value, usually one United States dollar, so firms can move money on blockchains without taking the price swings of bitcoin or ether. (deloitte.com) American Express chief executive Steve Squeri said in July 2025 that stablecoins were a viable alternative to rails such as the Automated Clearing House and Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, even though he said they were unlikely to replace those systems outright. (paymentsdive.com) Visa has also been expanding the card side of that model. On March 3, 2026, Visa said it was widening its work with Bridge, a Stripe company, to bring stablecoin-linked Visa cards to more than 100 countries. (visa.com) The result is a quieter form of crypto adoption than the trading booms of 2021. Consumers may see a brokerage ticket or a rewards card, while the bigger change sits underneath, where banks and payment networks are testing blockchains as another money rail. (cnbc.com, visa.com, jpmorgan.com)
