Institutional crypto adoption remains flat in 2025, but it’s not necessarily negative signal, says GlobalData

Institutional involvement will remain key for adoption in the US, which was the only market to show a meaningful increase in organizational crypto adoption plans between H1 and H2 in GlobalData’s sentiment poll, rising from 33% to 42%.

A global sentiment poll* has shown no change in institutions’ interest in operational crypto adoption between H1 and H2 of 2025, despite the stablecoin boom. Just over 40% of financial services (FS) industry insiders globally reported having involvement or plans for crypto implementation as part of their organizations’ core operations, as laggards wait out this crypto winter before making any strategic moves, according to GlobalData, a leading intelligence and productivity platform.

The findings suggest that much of the stablecoin growth seen in 2025 may have been usage-driven rather than the result of deeper core-system integration by regulated financial institutions.

Blandina Szalay, Banking & Payments Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “Positioning will matter the most in the coming year for any operational-level involvement in the crypto space, as use cases diverge across geographies. On one side, long-awaited regulatory advancements resulted in significant noise around financial institutions’ crypto adoption across some advanced economies last year, fueled by hopes that institutional involvement will achieve the usage scale that new decentralized financial services have not been able to reach since their invention.”

Nevertheless, any level of institutionalization naturally goes against the initial founding ideologies of cryptos, where early adopters opted for decentralized money to avoid intermediaries and remain anonymous. What was once positioned as the first truly borderless currency and movement of money, has now found itself scrambling for national regulatory approvals and institutions’ AML/KYC checks to be able to function, meanwhile losing some of that momentum and use cases that initially popularized this technology. Therefore, higher institutional involvement will not automatically translate into higher usage for the industry globally, particularly if the original value proposition becomes diluted.

Szalay continues: “Cryptocurrencies were inherently designed to function without supervision. A clear demonstration of this is Ukraine and Nigeria ranking at the top of the crypto transactional use index globally, based on a recent report by Bybit. In 2025, these two countries achieved the highest GDP-adjusted stablecoin flows, using unregulated UDST, where demand was organically driven by a strong need for its characteristics, which institutions have been failing to meet in the first place. This underlines that in certain markets, crypto adoption is primarily necessity-driven, filling gaps left by domestic monetary systems rather than emerging as a result of institutional endorsement.”

However, institutional involvement will remain key for adoption in the US, which was the only market to show a meaningful increase in organizational crypto adoption plans between H1 and H2 in GlobalData’s sentiment poll, rising from 33% to 42%. The biggest stablecoin issuer, Tether, was quick to respond by launching the new USAT coin by the end of last year, designed specifically to comply with the US crypto regulatory landscape, while USDT’s use as a store of value and payment tool continues to grow elsewhere.  

Szalay concludes: “To enter the crypto space in 2026, localized or regional operators can adapt crypto product and service integrations to local needs and regulations, based on their market specific knowledge. Bigger global financial institutions, on the other hand, will have a harder time strategically navigating this landscape as long as regulation, market needs, and consumer sentiment remain vastly different across geographies.”

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*The poll is conducted regularly across GlobalData’s FS news media sites. It was conducted on Verdict Media sites and gathered 214 respondents from industry insiders in H1 2025, and 213 responses in H2.