For years, banks treated blockchain the way most large institutions treat uncomfortable new technologies: with caution, distance, and a long list of reasons to wait.
That posture is changing.
In a recent episode of the Money Rewired podcast by CoinsPaid Media, Murat Prokopov, Strategic Partnerships Executive at Coinspaid, spoke with Vid Hribar, who led Raiffeisen Bank’s Blockchain Hub. The conversation made one thing clear: for large banks, blockchain is no longer a fringe topic or a reputational nuisance. It is becoming an infrastructure question.
The full episode is available now on the CoinsPaid Media YouTube channel and popular podcast platforms:
Banks Are Using Crypto Crises To Their Advantage
When Hribar first started talking about crypto to the bank’s board, he faced a lot of skepticism. Leaders argued that crypto was backed by nothing, used by criminals, and lacked real demand.
To change their minds, Hribar used advanced tracking tools to prove crypto could be handled safely. Surprisingly, he also used major industry crashes, like the collapse of FTX, to make his case.
“When FTX happened a couple of years ago, we found a way to actually turn these moments into an opportunity for the banks. We see the banks as the trust function having the custody and offering the services in a way that we avoid this kind of collapse,” he added.
Custody Is The Mandatory Starting Line
Some crypto fans think banks are trapped in a dead end if they only hold digital assets instead of trading them. Hribar says that’s wrong. Holding the assets is the foundation for everything else.
“Custody is the core of any digital asset offering by the bank. If you want to offer cryptocurrencies to your clients, you need a custodian. If you want to tokenize securities, you need custody. If you want to establish a use case with stablecoins, you need custody. If you start with custody, you have a lot of things open for you,” Vid shared.
The hard part for banks is the upfront cost. It’s tough to justify spending millions on a crypto storage system just to test one product, like a digital bond. Bank boards have to believe that digital assets are the actual future of the entire business.
The Plan For A “Unified” Euro Stablecoin
Right now, the stablecoin market has a huge problem: US Dollars dominate almost everything. While the Euro makes up 20% of global trade, Euro stablecoins make up just 0.2% of the crypto market.
To fix this, Raiffeisen Bank joined forces with a massive alliance of European banks (including ING and BBVA) to create a joint company called Qivalis. Their goal is to launch a single, highly regulated Euro stablecoin. Vid explained why they had to team up instead of building separate coins:
“What we’ve learned is that if we issue a stablecoin and if every bank issues its own stablecoin, the market will be very fragmented and the liquidity will be spread around. That’s why we decided on this joint approach where banks come together and join forces and issue one stablecoin.”
The best part? This won’t be a private banking club. Qivalis plans to put the coin on public exchanges and connect it directly to decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.
What’s Next?
Hribar’s bigger point is that the next phase is not about banks becoming crypto companies. It is about banks learning to operate on blockchain rails without losing the things that make them banks.
That future, he suggests, is moving toward what he calls on-chain finance: a system where the underlying infrastructure changes, even if the institutional role remains.
The banks that move early are not doing so because they are chasing a trend. They are doing it because the market is already forcing the question. And in finance, waiting for certainty is often the riskiest decision of all.
