- While Neobanks and Exchanges Already Earn Revenue from Staking, Traditional Banks Are Still Negotiating Permission to Join the Business
- The staking business no longer depends solely on retail users. Global players are now building the rails that will allow traditional banks to enter the market later.
The staking business no longer depends solely on retail users. Global players are now building the rails that will allow traditional banks to enter the market later.
Staking has evolved from a niche crypto activity into one of the key competitive battlegrounds of 2026. The divide between firms already offering staking services and those still waiting for regulatory approval—crypto-native fintechs and neobanks on one side, traditional banks on the other—is shaping much of the competitive landscape across Latin America and the United States.
Those Already Profiting
Today, the staking market is largely concentrated among players that do not carry the regulatory architecture of a traditional bank. In Latin America, neobanks have integrated staking directly into their mass-market apps. Nubank offers staking and rewards on 28 digital assets to more than 7 million users who already engage with crypto features within its broader base of 131 million customers, making it the most comprehensive crypto offering among the region’s neobanks.
Alongside them operate regional exchanges such as Bitso, Ripio, and Buda, which combine local banking rails, liquidity, and an expanding suite of yield-generating products.
Institutional momentum has also reached a new scale. In February 2026, Crypto Finance Group, the digital asset subsidiary of Deutsche Börse Group, announced its expansion into Latin America, targeting banks, asset managers, and financial intermediaries seeking institutional-grade custody and infrastructure. The move signals that staking is no longer solely a retail-driven business: global players are building the infrastructure that will eventually allow traditional banks to participate.
Banks that are already active in certain crypto segments—though not necessarily in staking yet—offer a glimpse of the path ahead. Banco Santander Brasil integrated cryptocurrency trading into its mobile app in 2023. Banco de Crédito del Perú developed a crypto-access platform within its banking environment. Itaú Unibanco launched digital asset custody services in 2024. None of these initiatives were undertaken for branding purposes alone; their goal is to retain customer flows that had already begun migrating toward non-bank exchanges.
Those Seeking to Enter
Traditional banks across Latin America are following a clear sequence: custody first, everything else later.
In Argentina, the Central Bank finalized a regulatory framework allowing commercial banks to offer crypto trading and custody services, with implementation expected in 2026, reversing restrictions that had been in place since 2022.
At the same time, Brazil formally established three operational categories—intermediaries, custodians, and brokers—through Central Bank Resolutions 519, 520, and 521 issued in November 2025, recognizing custody as a regulated and independent function.
The logic behind this progression is straightforward. Custody represents the lowest regulatory-risk entry point, allowing institutions to expand later into trading, tokenization, and staking. In other words, staking is not the entry point for banks entering crypto. It is phase two or three, arriving only after the challenge of securely safeguarding digital assets has been resolved.
In the United States, the regulatory opening emerged first through securities guidance. In May 2025, SEC staff concluded that protocol staking, when narrowly defined, does not constitute a securities offering under either the Securities Act or the Exchange Act. While the guidance reflects a staff interpretation rather than a binding rule, it marked a significant shift.
The SEC is already moving further. Its proposed “Regulation Crypto” framework could be released for public comment as early as July 2026, establishing formal exemptions and regulatory safe harbors for certain on-chain activities.
The Battle Ahead
The debate is no longer whether staking will be permitted. For the most part, that question has already been settled in favor of the activity. The real conflict concerns the conditions under which staking will operate and who will control the rules.
Three areas concentrate the tension:
Provider Discretion
SEC guidance does not cover every staking model. Arrangements in which providers guarantee fixed rewards or exercise discretion over when and how much to stake fall outside the proposed safe harbor and remain legally uncertain. Such active management can trigger the “efforts of others” component of the Howey Test. Ironically, this is precisely the model used by many staking-as-a-service products currently offered by banks and neobanks.
Congress Versus Regulators
The Clarity Act faces critical weeks in the U.S. Senate. If lawmakers fail to advance the bill before August, its prospects for passage this year diminish significantly due to the November midterm election cycle.
Faced with that uncertainty, the SEC has chosen not to wait. Rather than relying on congressional action, the agency is developing its own exemption-based framework in parallel.
Europe Starts from Scratch
While the United States moves toward greater permissiveness, Europe is only beginning to evaluate whether staking requires its own regulatory framework.
The European Parliament’s ECON Committee has approved a report requesting that the European Commission assess the regulation of DeFi, staking, crypto lending, and NFTs, with a plenary vote scheduled for July 7.
What Brussels decides over the next two years will determine whether Europe becomes a hub for blockchain innovation or a fragmented market. The same observation, with important nuances, could also apply to Latin America, where countries continue advancing at different speeds without a common regional framework.
The Window of Opportunity
The result is a temporary asymmetry.
Neobanks and exchanges that already offer staking continue to accumulate users, transaction history, and behavioral data while traditional banks are still negotiating the regulatory framework that will allow them to compete.
By the time banks complete the custody-trading-staking sequence, the crypto yield market in Latin America may already have established winners.
The fundamental question is no longer whether banks will be allowed to offer staking. That increasingly appears to be settled. The real question is whether they will arrive in time to compete for a user base that crypto-native fintechs have already captured.