Barclays Just Put $2 Trillion Worth of Credibility Behind Blockchain Banking

Barclays has issued a formal request for information to technology suppliers, evaluating the development of a blockchain-based infrastructure for payments and settlements.

When a bank managing more than $2 trillion in assets starts asking tech vendors how to build a blockchain platform, it’s not a research project anymore. It’s a direction.

The bank wants to select its technology partners as early as April 2026, which in banking terms is practically tomorrow. This isn’t a whitepaper. It isn’t a working group. It’s procurement language, and procurement language means something is actually getting built.

What Barclays Is Actually Building

The internal deliberations, according to people familiar with the matter, center on two specific tools: regulated stablecoins and tokenized deposits. Both serve the same underlying purpose, enabling near-instant transaction finality instead of the settlement delays that still plague traditional interbank payments. Add programmable money features on top of that, and you’re looking at infrastructure that could fundamentally change how Barclays moves money between counterparties.

Tokenized deposits are particularly interesting here. Unlike stablecoins issued by crypto-native firms, tokenized deposits are essentially bank deposits represented on a blockchain, same regulatory protections, same balance sheet backing, just faster and programmable. For an institution like Barclays, that distinction matters enormously when it comes to regulatory comfort and client trust.

The platform isn’t live yet. Partners haven’t been selected. But the fact that Barclays is already in the vendor evaluation stage suggests internal approvals have been secured and the project has organizational momentum behind it.

The Ubyx Investment Wasn’t Random

Back in January 2026, Barclays took a strategic stake in Ubyx, a U.S.-based clearing system built specifically to move tokenized money and regulated stablecoins between institutions. At the time it looked like a quiet fintech bet. In hindsight it reads like preparation.

Investing in the clearing infrastructure before building the platform that needs clearing infrastructure isn’t a coincidence. It suggests Barclays has been thinking about this end-to-end for longer than the recent headlines imply, and that the April partner selection timeline has probably been on someone’s roadmap for months.

JPMorgan Already Did This. Now Everyone Has To.

Barclays isn’t the first major bank down this road, and that context is worth sitting with. JPMorgan built its own blockchain infrastructure years ago, JPM Coin has been processing institutional transactions since 2019. Other global banks have followed in various forms. The technology has been proven at scale. The question for everyone else was never really if, it was when the pressure became unavoidable.

For Barclays, that moment appears to be now. Clients moving large sums between institutions increasingly expect settlement in minutes, not days. Rivals offering that speed create a competitive gap that traditional rails simply can’t close. Blockchain, for all the noise around it, solves a specific and real problem in wholesale banking, and $2 trillion in assets gives Barclays both the incentive and the weight to do this properly.

Why This Matters for Crypto

A bank of this size moving toward regulated stablecoins and tokenized deposits is a different kind of validation than anything the crypto industry generates internally. It’s not speculative. It’s not ideological. It’s a $2 trillion institution concluding that blockchain infrastructure is the most practical solution to a payments problem it needs to solve.

April is close. Watch who they pick.

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