New survey of institutional operators and executives finds regulatory uncertainty is the industry’s biggest barrier and its biggest opportunity
zerohash, the leading onchain infrastructure provider, and Ava Labs, the high performance blockchain platform built for business, today announced the findings of The Onchain Readiness Report, a new survey analyzing how banks, fintechs, payments companies, brokerages, asset managers, and crypto-native firms are approaching onchain adoption.
Drawing on responses from 162 institutional operators and executives, the report offers signals on sentiment, investment priorities, adoption timelines, and multi-chain strategy. The findings reveal that institutional adoption has moved past the experimentation phase for a meaningful share of the market, but that readiness varies sharply by sector, and a small number of structural gaps, chief among them regulatory clarity, will determine which organizations scale successfully and which fall behind.
Regulation remains the industry’s biggest unlock
Regulatory clarity ranks as both the top-cited barrier to adoption and the top-cited accelerant, more than any other factor measured in the survey. More than two-thirds of respondents (68.5%) say regulatory clarity would accelerate adoption more than anything else, ahead of customer demand (60.5%) and proven ROI from peers (45.7%). Roughly two in five respondents (38.9%) name regulatory uncertainty and licensing as the single biggest hurdle to adoption, more than double the next-closest barrier, unclear ROI (17.3%).
Read More on Fintech : Global FinTech Interview: AI and the future of fintech with Hugh Cumming, CTO, Vena
Investment is consolidating around stablecoin settlement and RWA tokenization
Stablecoin payments and settlement (37.7%) and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization (25.3%) together draw nearly two-thirds of all expected institutional investment (63%) over the next 24 months. Priorities diverge by sector: banks are far more focused on tokenization (42.3% name it their top priority) while fintechs overindex on cross-border settlement (25%).
Banks show a “readiness paradox” that points to a compressed demand wave
Just over one in seven bank respondents (15.4%) say blockchain is already standard for their business, the lowest share of any segment. Yet more than half (61.5%) expect it to be standard within two years, nearly double the overall average (32.1%), pointing to a rapid catch-up rather than a gradual ramp. Payments companies (57.9%) and brokerages (45.8%) are already the furthest along.
Asset managers are the segment most at risk of falling behind
Asset managers are the most likely to say they’re behind their peers (35.7%, nearly double the rough average of ~19.1%), the most likely to cite a lack of internal expertise (28.6%), versus under one in ten overall (9.3%), and the most likely to say onchain adoption isn’t even on their roadmap (21.4%).
Interoperability confusion remains a largely unaddressed planning gap
More than one in five respondents (22.8%) say they simply don’t know how many blockchain networks they’ll need to support over the next two years, a share that climbs to nearly half among organizations still evaluating their strategy or with no current plans in place.
AI agents are expected to be transacting on customers’ behalf within two years
Nearly half of all respondents (46.9%), and nearly two-thirds of product leaders specifically (63.6%), expect AI agents to routinely transact, trade, or manage balances on behalf of customers within two years.
“This data confirms what we hear from institutions every day: the technology is ready, and for banks especially, momentum is building fast,“ said Mark Daly, Chief Business Officer at zerohash. “The institutions that get ahead of that shift now, by working with infrastructure that’s already built for scale, will be the ones setting the pace instead of playing catch-up.”
“The report makes clear that institutional adoption is no longer a question of if, but how quickly organizations can move from strategy to production,” said John Nahas, Chief Business Officer at Ava Labs. “As stablecoin settlement and tokenized assets become core investment priorities, institutions need infrastructure that delivers the control, interoperability, and scale required for deployment. The organizations building that foundation today will be best positioned to lead the next phase of onchain finance.”
Catch more Fintech Insights : Global FinTech Innovations Are Transforming Banking into Continuous Financial Guidance
[To share your insights with us, please write to psen@itechseries.com ]
