Integrating Digital Assets into Core Treasury Operations: A Roundtable Recap

On 18 June 2026, the Solana Research Institute convened an invitation-only roundtable at House of Sol in London. Attendees spanned treasury and payments leads, custodians, infrastructure providers, stablecoin issuers, and risk and regulatory specialists. The question on the table: as major payment networks move stablecoin settlement onto public blockchain rails, what does it actually take to build this into core treasury operations?

Four themes dominated the two-hour discussion.

Digital Settlements: which assets?

Participants quickly honed in on the three obvious advantages of stablecoin over correspondent banking for settlement: settlement in seconds rather than days, materially lower per-transaction cost (especially on Solana vs. Ethereum), and an audit trail that compliance functions under active regulatory scrutiny find genuinely useful to trace the flow of funds.

The deeper discussion focused on stablecoins versus tokenised deposits. Treasury practitioners argued that tokenised deposits may win out for institutions managing multi-jurisdiction liquidity, since they stay inside existing correspondent banking relationships and credit lines while adding programmability on top. The two instruments look like substitutes on the surface but largely solve different problems.

The lack of clearing infrastructure for transferring stablecoin assets received a lot of attention.  Onchain payments move the liability - the stablecoin issuer’s promise to pay- but not the assets in the backing portfolio. This is fine for large, widely accepted stablecoins, but it makes it harder to use smaller, newer or less liquid instruments, which may impact competition or create concentration risks in the long run.  

The other immediate concern that surfaced relates to holding stablecoins overnight. Institutions are reluctant to hold stablecoins on the balance sheet: aside from any risk concerns, they are non-yield-bearing and so represent idle cash. Onchain investments like staking are off limits because of the capital treatment of native crypto assets, and converting back to fiat at end of day adds operational drag. Tokenised money market funds — yield plus near-instant liquidity — were the most credible near-term fix discussed.

Custody, wallets, and key management

Operational risk management in Web 3 starts with the challenges of Web 2 and adds new ones on top.

Examples include smart contract and bridging risks.  However, attention focused on key management and custody because the non-recoverability of lost keys adds a set of risks not present in traditional centrally administered systems. Experienced practitioners in the room noted that the custody technology stack was manageable, but that the consequences of getting key management wrong are too severe for most institutions to consider building internal capability from scratch.

Something like a standard, tiered architecture is emerging for key management: cold storage for the bulk of holdings, MPC-based warm wallet for assets in active use, and exchange accounts with role-based access controls for trading. Transaction approval policies are calibrated by dollar threshold, exactly as for legacy payment and trading systems.  While firms do not trust themselves to manage their own custody, the market for institutional custody and wallet infrastructure services also presents challenges. For a start, it is still consolidating.  There are also concerns about critical service provider risks: an institution that builds its entire operational stack around a single custody provider is exposed if that provider encounters difficulties. The practical fix is to architect for failover from the outset: primary and secondary RPC providers, primary and secondary wallet providers, and a clear understanding of what the switching process looks like before it is needed.

Resilience: Planning for the chain that stops

Resilience is a central issue for financial institutions, rooted in sound business logic, but strongly reinforced by regulation, and this discussion started from the requirement for UK financial institutions operating under FCA oversight to plan for severe but plausible scenarios. 

On a public blockchain, such scenarios could include fragmentation or degradation of the networks.  Dealing with these kinds of issues is relatively tractable: primary and secondary RPC providers, geographically distributed node access, and pre-agreed failover processes can handle most operational disruptions short of a complete chain halt. The more difficult question is what happens to assets held on a chain that stops producing blocks, particularly where those assets are tokenised real-world securities with legal contracts behind them.

To many who have grown up in Web 3, a complete network outage seems unlikely.  A sufficiently distributed network is highly resistant to a complete outage because block production continues as long as any meaningful subset of validators remains operational. Solana's validator distribution was cited as a relevant data point. 

This point was acknowledged.  However, unlikely does not mean implausible: a sufficiently well-resourced attacker, or a pernicious software bug, could halt block operations, and regulators are entitled to ask what contingency plans an institution has in place for that eventuality.

Discussion focused on two sets of consequences. The first was the enforcement of claims against an issuer of tokenised assets. For native crypto assets, holders can base their claim on proof of ownership through their private key against the last finalised block. The picture may be less clean where the token represents a claim to assets issued off-chain, and here the legal structure matters considerably. The example discussed was a Luxembourg-based SPV structure.  Explicit wording that documents tokenholder rights against the underlying asset in the event of a chain outage was described as a baseline feature of institutional-grade tokens.  Ambiguity only increases for assets bridged across chains, especially where the legal status of the bridged token is only implied operationally, not formally documented.

The second set of consequences relates to where a token holder needs to trade out of a position that cannot be redeemed against the issuer,  perhaps because the asset is not yet mature.   This question was not fully resolved, but most practical framing offered was to treat a chain outage as a liquidity event rather than a credit event, and to build legal structures that allow holders to establish claims fast enough to actually use. The analogy to the structured contingency provisions established by CSDs to deal with operational failure was noted as a template worth examining.

Winning on the home front: the internal barriers to change

Several participants from large institutions made the same point: the first-order barrier to adoption is usually internal. Second line of defence functions, like Operational Risk and Compliance, apply scrutiny that's part genuine risk management, part unfamiliarity with the asset class.

Knowledge is building, but unevenly.  Some second-line functions ask focused, informed questions that get to the heart of the issues.  Others are still working through the basics when they engage with a new project, leading to a pattern of advanced-stage initiatives stalling at the compliance review stage.

Second-line functions are most comfortable evaluating the custody layer. Institutional custodians provide structure around key management and asset security that fits within familiar frameworks.

The balance-sheet treatment of stablecoins came up as a specific constraint. There were two issues. The first was the capital treatment applied to stablecoin holdings.  There is a classification issue: a stablecoin's Basel treatment turns on whether it can demonstrate Group 1b status; those that can't (or whose status is untested) risk attracting punitive capital charges, but even where these do not apply, assessments of the counterparty risk may be less developed than for more established financial institutions.  The second was the accounting treatment of stablecoins: specifically, whether they count as cash or securities, which impacts things like a bank’s liquidity ratios.  These are solvable regulatory questions with movement anticipated, but they're a practical brake today.

A structural observation that emerged from the discussion was that the institutions making the most progress are often those that have created a subsidiary or ring-fenced vehicle for digital asset activity, rather than trying to integrate it directly into the regulated bank entity. This is less a principled choice than a pragmatic response to how slowly a full-service bank's risk and compliance functions can absorb a new asset class.

What comes next

This was the first in an ongoing SRI programme of closed-door sessions on institutional participation in on-chain financial infrastructure. Two threads feed directly into SRI's research agenda: the legal frameworks needed for institutional-grade tokenised assets, and the capital treatment of stablecoins as the regulatory position develops.

The next session will be announced in due course. Institutions interested in participating should contact the SRI directly.

The Solana Research Institute (SRI) is an applied research forum dedicated to the participation of financial institutions in blockchain-based financial systems. Through research, structured discussion, and working groups, the SRI examines the technical, legal, and structural questions shaping the next generation of financial market infrastructure, with a focus on the Solana ecosystem. The SRI is a Swiss-based not-for-profit organisation. solresearch.institute