Strategy's Bitcoin Banking Index Scores 25 Banks at 32% With No Methodology

Strategy put a number on TradFi's Bitcoin progress. The number is unverified, self-serving, and still more useful than anything Wall Street has published about itself.

Key takeaways

• Strategy's new Bitcoin Banking Adoption Index scores 25 global institutions at a 32% overall average, with Fidelity leading at 71% and SMBC and Royal Bank of Canada tied at the bottom at 13%.
• The top six (Fidelity, BNY, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup) all reached comparable scores through different pathways: custody platforms, spot ETFs, tokenization infrastructure, and institutional payments.
• Strategy holds 843,775 BTC per its own disclosures and has a direct financial interest in the story its own index tells. No public methodology has been released as of publication.

Strategy CEO Phong Le posted the company's new Bitcoin Banking Adoption Index on X on July 13, 2026, grading 25 of the world's largest financial institutions on their Bitcoin and digital-asset integration. The overall score across all 25: 32%. Executive Chairman Michael Saylor amplified the post with the summary: "Major-bank Bitcoin adoption is accelerating, but still early: 32% overall as measured by the index."

Le's own post indicated that "methodology and updates" would follow, and that institutions with questions or corrections were welcome to reach out, with the post truncated at that point. No scoring criteria have been made public as of publication.

What the Scores Actually Show

Fidelity led the field at 71%, a gap that reflects an eight-year head start. The firm built Fidelity Digital Assets for institutional custody and execution in 2018, issues the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) as a spot ETF, and serves as custodian for the fund's own BTC holdings. No other institution in the index has that combination under one roof.

BNY came in second at 46%, driven by its digital asset custody platform. Goldman Sachs placed third at 45%, supported by its April 14, 2026 SEC filing for a Bitcoin Premium Income ETF and its institutional digital-asset platform.

JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup each scored 43%, though they got there differently. JPMorgan's score rests on Kinexys and JPM Coin, both tokenization and payments plays. Morgan Stanley counts the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT), E*TRADE access to Bitcoin ETPs, and a pending SEC filing for an Ethereum Trust. Citigroup built its score around Citi Token Services, a 24/7 cross-border payments infrastructure running on tokenized deposits and smart contracts.

Wells Fargo came in at 38%. Banco Santander and Société Générale each scored 35%. SMBC and Royal Bank of Canada tied at the bottom at 13%.

One number the index does not produce: customer counts, transaction volumes, assets under management, or revenue. A 71% score means the capability is publicly visible. It says nothing about whether anyone is actually using it.

The Pressure Instrument Thesis

The more interesting question is what this index is designed to do, not what it currently measures.

Strategy holds 843,775 BTC per its own disclosures. Every institution that deepens Bitcoin integration raises liquidity, legitimacy, and the price floor for that position. Saylor is not a neutral observer publishing this for the public good. That conflict should be named and weighted by anyone citing the scores.

That said, the index does something no institution has done for itself: it puts a public number on Bitcoin readiness and attaches it to names that have board-level reputations to protect. A bank scoring 13% next to a competitor at 45% has an internal problem. Compliance departments will notice. Client-facing executives will notice. The ESG-ranking parallel is apt: nobody thought a sustainability score would move capital allocation, until it did.

The Goldman-Saylor relationship now has a new layer: Goldman scored third on an index published by its most prominent Bitcoin-backed credit client. Whether Goldman welcomes or resists that framing tells you something about where institutional appetite actually sits.

The falsifiable version of this thesis: if no named institution responds publicly within 12 months, no methodology lands, and no score changes on a follow-up index, the pressure-instrument argument fails. It becomes a one-time marketing post that TradFi ignored.

The Self-Custody Counter-Signal

For individual Bitcoiners, the real second-order read here runs in the opposite direction from the headline.

Every percentage point these banks gain on this index means more Bitcoin moving into bank-custodied, bank-intermediated wrappers. The MiCA-driven self-custody push in Europe and the Brazilian court ruling affirming self-custody rights are pulling one direction. This index is pulling the other. Institutional adoption and personal sovereignty are not the same thing, and conflating them is the error to avoid.

The 32% baseline means two-thirds of the measurable integration work is still ahead for these institutions. That race will accelerate. More of it will run through custodied products, ETF wrappers, and tokenized instruments than through self-sovereign wallets. The corporate treasury flywheel is real. It is not the same flywheel orange-pill advocates are running.

What to Watch

Strategy invited corrections from institutions directly. Whether any named bank responds publicly is the first indicator of whether this index has teeth or fades. The second is whether a verifiable methodology ships. Without one, every score in the index is Strategy's approximation of publicly available data, described by the company itself as "approximate." That is either intellectual honesty or a tell. Watch which it turns out to be.

Sources

• @phongle on X, July 13, 2026
• @saylor on X, July 13, 2026