Will more wallets turn into "Bitcoin banks" as we go mainstream?
I keep noticing how wallets are absorbing features that used to belong to banks. A few years back, a Bitcoin wallet was a place to send, receive, and hold and that was about it. Now there are cards you can spend with, yield products, the option to borrow against your BTC instead of selling it etc.
Xverse is doing a great job with this. They rebranded as a "sovereign onchain bank," and the feature set backs up the name. You get a card (not sure if it's live yet, there was a waitlist) for spending stablecoins, an earn product that compounds yield on BTC and stablecoins, and support across a few Bitcoin layers so it all lives in one view. The catch, in a good way, is that you still hold your own keys. That's the part that keeps it from being a bank in the old sense.
The custody part is the main difference to "traditional" neobank I would say. A normal neobank holds your money and you trust them not to freeze it or lose it. A self-custodial wallet hands you the keys and the responsibility that comes with them. So as these apps stack on banking features, the open question is whether mainstream users actually want that responsibility, or whether they'll gravitate toward whoever hides the seed phrase behind the friendliest interface.
My hunch is the "Bitcoin bank" framing sticks around, mostly because it's the easiest way to explain any of this to someone who has never touched crypto. Spend, save, earn, borrow. People already know those words. Whether the self-custody part survives contact with the mainstream is what I'm less sure about.
Posted Jun 18, 2026, 7:01 AM UTC