banks

According to Dealroom.co citing Bloomberg News, a consortium of 10 banks has provided Crux AI with a $22 billion loan secured by chips. Crux AI is the AI cloud service joint venture launched by Blackstone and Alphabet in May, which officially started last week.The loan will be used to purchase Google-customized TPUs. Crux AI has received a $5 billion equity investment from Blackstone, with Google providing TPUs, software, and services, planning to produce the first batch of 500 megawatts by 2027. Named lending institutions include Goldman Sachs, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Barclays, BNP Paribas, and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

According to an analysis by Cointelegraph of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) MiCA registration data, the number of banks on the EU MiCA crypto service provider list has doubled from about 40 on June 26 to about 80 on September 16, with the proportion rising from about 17% to nearly 23%, approaching one-quarter. During the same period, the total number of registered Crypto Asset Service Providers (CASP) increased from 243 to 349, but the proportion of non-bank service providers decreased from about 84% to 77%, reflecting a relative shrinkage.Germany is the main driving force behind this round of bank expansion, with several cooperative banks and commercial banks recently appearing on ESMA's MiCA registration list, including Volksbank, Raiffeisenbank, and VR Bank. Germany's largest bank, Deutsche Bank, also announced on Wednesday plans to launch digital asset custody services for institutional and corporate clients in Europe. A spokesperson for the bank told Cointelegraph that regulatory approval under MiCA is expected in October.Unlike crypto companies that need to apply for CASP authorization, banks can provide crypto asset services through the notification procedure stipulated in Article 60 of MiCA, allowing them to bypass the standard CASP authorization process by simply submitting the required information to their national regulatory authority at least 40 working days before offering the service for the first time.

Binance founder CZ posted on X: Why do some people think banks need to be afraid of blockchain, or that banks need protection? Blockchain is a faster, cheaper, and easier way to transfer value. Blockchain is an open technology that anyone can use, including banks.

According to The Wall Street Journal, informed sources said that the database used by the Federal Reserve to monitor banks experienced a failure last month that lasted more than a day. This failure involved the Federal Reserve's National Information Center, which is used to provide bank-related data to regulators.It is reported that the National Information Center database experienced a failure lasting over 24 hours around August 5. Senator Elizabeth Warren stated in a letter that this database failure raised concerns about how staff cuts at the Federal Reserve might affect system maintenance and bank regulatory work.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessenet stated on social media: The CLARITY Act is crucial for ensuring that the United States wins the global new technology race. This is also the reason Congress passed the GENIUS Act, aimed at ensuring the construction of revolutionary financial technology infrastructure for stablecoins in the United States.Bessenet noted that ensuring the continued prosperity of the U.S. community banking sector has been a consistent focus since he took office. The government's dual emphasis on promoting the development of new digital technologies and appropriately adjusting community bank regulations is key to driving U.S. economic growth in both sectors. The final draft of the CLARITY Act advances this mission by granting the Treasury Secretary additional powers to take action when changes in the facts of deposit outflows adversely affect community banks.Bessenet stated: If stablecoins harm community banks, he will not hesitate to use these tools to ensure they are fully protected. Community banks are vital to the performance of the U.S. economy and Main Street growth; economic security is national security, and community banks play an important role in this principle.

According to South Korea's "JoongAng Ilbo," China's semiconductor industry is organized through collaboration among the central government, local governments, state-owned financial institutions, and enterprises, forming a system for fundraising, factory construction, and infrastructure support. The China National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund has a first phase of 138.7 billion RMB, a second phase of 204 billion RMB, and a third phase of 344 billion RMB, totaling 686.7 billion RMB, with investments in companies such as SMIC, Hua Hong Semiconductor, and Yangtze Memory Technologies.Changxin Memory, established for 10 years, has risen to fourth in global DRAM market share, with a net loss of 21.13 billion RMB over the past three years, while R&D and equipment investments during the same period reached 185.2 billion RMB, with Hefei's state-owned capital providing about 80% of the funding for early projects. South Korea's Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are responsible for investments, employment, technology development, and support for partners. The South Korean government plans to guide 622 trillion KRW in private investment by 2047 and provide 17 trillion KRW in low-interest loans and 1.1 trillion KRW in semiconductor ecosystem funds, but most of the burden will fall on enterprises.Park Kyung-soo, Executive Vice President of the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association: The semiconductor industry will fall behind in the next upturn if investment stops; even during downturns, R&D, equipment investment, and orders for materials and components must be maintained, requiring long-term policy, financial, and tax support. China is catching up with a national-level support system, and South Korea also needs a response system involving the government, political circles, financial institutions, and enterprises to act together.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong stated, "Community banks will have stronger competitiveness and opportunities to win the market if they adopt stablecoins. Coinbase is collaborating with Moov to help over 1,000 community banks integrate stablecoin-related capabilities into their existing systems. This will bring faster settlement speeds, lower costs, and real-time access to funds. The discussions in Washington regarding stablecoins and community banks overlook the most important point: stablecoins are an opportunity."

According to the Nikkei, SWIFT has launched a pilot project in collaboration with 17 banks including Citigroup, Mitsubishi UFJ, Wells Fargo, Bank of New York Mellon, UBS, and BNP Paribas to test tokenized deposit cross-border payments.The goal of this pilot is to achieve 24/7 instant transfers between different banks and reduce the cost of cross-border payments.

The central banks of the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom will announce their monetary policy decisions this week, with the market focusing on whether the Federal Reserve will initiate its first interest rate hike in three years.Iran and Gulf countries are negotiating shipping management in the Strait of Hormuz to address high crude oil prices.

According to a report by Decrypt, a new report released by the Bank for International Settlements shows that advanced AI technology has shortened the time window for banks to fix vulnerabilities before attackers exploit software flaws. It warns that periodic security assessments and scheduled patch updates have increasingly become insufficient to meet the challenges, with the time window from vulnerability discovery to exploitation reduced from weeks to minutes.The report focuses on the banks' response capabilities, arguing that financial institutions must accelerate the speed of software fixes and expedite the related authorization decision-making processes.

According to Bloomberg, U.S. regulators released a statement on Friday announcing a proposed guideline on third-party risk management for banks. The Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the National Credit Union Administration stated that the proposal aims to help banks and credit unions "better align and customize their third-party risk management practices to match the risks of various third-party relationships."Federal Reserve staff indicated in a memorandum that as this plan is introduced, banks are increasingly outsourcing certain functions and relying on third-party relationships to improve efficiency and reduce costs. The plan will be open for public comment, is non-binding, and aims to focus institutions' regulatory attention on a principles-based approach to such risks. Federal Reserve Governor Barr opposed the proposal, citing concerns about the standards for "significant financial risks."

According to Cointelegraph, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has partnered with financial platform Moov to provide stablecoin infrastructure for over 1,000 community banks and credit unions within Moov's customer base. The two parties will combine Coinbase's regulated digital asset infrastructure with Moov's payment platform to offer stablecoin payment acceptance, settlement, and real-time funding services.This infrastructure will support use cases such as consumer stablecoin payments, merchant settlements, and payments, and will provide businesses and merchants access to Coinbase's custodial accounts. U.S. community banks typically have total assets of less than $10 billion, including state-chartered institutions and savings and loan holding companies.This collaboration comes as major U.S. banks are experimenting with stablecoin infrastructure. On Wednesday, U.S. Bank, the fifth-largest commercial bank in the U.S., completed a real-time cross-border payment using its proprietary stablecoin USBDC on the Stellar blockchain. Earlier this month, 21 financial institutions, including Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and UBS, announced plans to form a company to issue stablecoins. Additionally, Western Union also partnered with stablecoin infrastructure provider Rain in August to launch a digital wallet and Visa-branded card.

SWIFT service provider Bottomline announced a collaboration with the blockchain infrastructure project Chainlink to enable over 600 bank clients in its network to access blockchain-based cross-border settlements. Bottomline processes over $16 trillion in payments annually and serves 1,200 financial institutions and 10,000 enterprises.Through this integration, banks can continue to use the ISO 20022 standard to send payment instructions, with Chainlink's infrastructure connecting the instructions to blockchain settlements. Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) supports the transfer of tokenized value across different blockchain networks, while Chainlink's Runtime Environment (CRE) is responsible for payment processes, transaction routing, and operational change coordination.CCIP has been recording mainnet activity since July 2023 and is currently connected to over 60 blockchain networks. Chainlink's Project Pangea has covered more than 50 banking institutions in Europe and South Korea, with participants managing assets totaling over $10 trillion, and the project's goals include achieving T+0 settlement for foreign exchange transactions.

The semiconductor and AI independent research organization SemiAnalysis released a deep security report on Neocloud (new cloud), revealing various cross-tenant security vulnerabilities discovered during the ClusterMAX 3 testing period. In a four-month test covering 25 vendors and 32 clusters, the team achieved multiple instances of cross-tenant remote code execution (RCE) solely by exploiting publicly known vulnerabilities and basic configuration checks. Affected entities included banks, telecommunications companies, universities, research institutions, AI laboratories, and even a national intelligence agency.Typical issues included: shared Kubernetes control plane leading to tenant metadata visibility, container escape, exposure of BMC/IPMI management networks, incorrect configuration of InfiniBand security keys (P_Key, SA_Key, M_Key), unfortified default trust mode of BlueField DPU, Grafana monitoring dashboards using god-level API keys, and lack of VXLAN isolation in front-end networks. The report specifically pointed out a cascading vulnerability case: a misconfiguration of shared vCluster combined with software versions being two years out of date ultimately completed the POC verification of cross-tenant RCE within an afternoon.Notably, the report questioned the mainstream narrative that "AI has fundamentally changed the pace of cybersecurity": statistics on CVEs for NVIDIA GPU drivers, CUDA, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Docker, and the Linux kernel showed that there was no significant increase in vulnerabilities after the popularization of AI coding models, with most data supporting the "no change hypothesis." The report also detailed the incident where an OpenAI-trained agent attacked Hugging Face, where the AI agent achieved cluster-level privilege escalation through a message board established via Artifactory, which went undetected from May to July. While building POC verification for existing vulnerabilities, the team found that Claude Fable and GPT-5.6 Sol frequently rejected security-related requests, ultimately relying on open-source models such as DeepSeek V4, Kimi K3, and GLM-5.2 to complete the task.SemiAnalysis stated that the core issue in the Neocloud (new cloud) industry is not the new risks brought by AI, but rather the long-term absence of basic patch management, tenant isolation, and security design. They recommended that vendors establish automated security announcement monitoring systems and rectify single points of failure that could expose all users' architectural patterns.

Vassilis Tziokas from Matter Labs pointed out in a CoinDesk article that the U.S. Senate has postponed the Clarity Act until September. This market structure bill failed to complete the final vote before the August recess, meaning that regulatory rules for the digital asset market will take weeks to be implemented. Meanwhile, banks are not waiting for regulation; JPMorgan has processed over $30 trillion in transactions through the Kinexys platform and launched the deposit token JPMD, while Citigroup operates cross-border Treasury token services. A clearinghouse, in collaboration with 17 major financial institutions, plans to achieve on-chain tokenized deposit clearing by 2027.The article argues that the interoperability of interbank tokenized deposits does not come from messaging standards or token bridges, but is realized through clearing mechanisms: the sending bank redeems tokens, the receiving bank issues its own tokens, inter-institutional obligations are recorded and netted, and ultimately settled in central bank currency. The engineering challenge lies in simultaneously satisfying privacy, neutrality, and verifiability; each institution must operate its own ledger, prove transfers through cryptography without exposing underlying data, and anchor to a neutral settlement facility owned by no participants.The author notes that the Clarity Act will not directly regulate tokenized deposits, but it can clarify the boundaries of the digital asset market and improve the stablecoin framework established by the GENIUS Act. The Global Financial Markets Association's report in April 2026 lists unresolved gaps such as unified processing of cross-border tokenized deposits and guidelines for off-network transfers, which are regulatory unlocking points for interbank tokenized fund interoperability. In the face of regulatory uncertainty, banks rationally choose to isolate, and each month of delay rewards closed gardens.

Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, abbreviated as Dallas Fed, indicate that tokenized deposits and real-time blockchain transfers may weaken bank liquidity and limit their ability to issue long-term loans. The study was authored by Rosie Levy and Srini Ramaswamy.The research points out that of the $7 trillion in term risk borne by U.S. banks, approximately 80% is supported by the term characteristics of traditional deposits. If the weighted average term of deposits shortens by 10%, the banking system's term transformation capacity will decrease by about $580 billion, potentially increasing liquidity risk and pressure for fund outflows. Chris Turner, co-founder of Kula, stated that the speed of token transfers does not equate to the legal settlement of underlying financial claims. Tokens can be transferred through the blockchain network in seconds, but payments, ownership, and legal claims still rely on banks, custodians, clearing systems, and regulatory registries to complete the settlement.

According to CoinDesk, Dallas Federal Reserve economists Rosie Levy and Srini Ramaswamy estimate that if depositors' sensitivity to interest rates increases by 10%, tokenized deposits could reduce U.S. banks' ability to bear long-term interest rate risk by about $700 billion; if tokenization leads to a 10% early outflow of deposits, banks would lose about $580 billion in risk absorption capacity.Tokenized deposits place commercial bank money on the blockchain, supporting programmable payments and real-time settlement, but smart contracts and AI agents could automate deposit transfers, weakening deposit stickiness. Banks can respond by raising deposit rates, increasing reserves and government bonds, or relying more on term debt, but this could drive up credit costs for consumers and businesses.Research from Brazil's instant payment network Pix shows that more frequent use of the system increases banks' holdings of liquid assets like government bonds while reducing credit intermediation. Currently, tokenized deposits are still in the early stages, with clearinghouses and U.S. banks such as Bank of America, Citibank, and Wells Fargo developing interoperable networks that support interbank clearing, automated workflows, and 24/7 settlement.