Crypto was founded on a simple premise: people should be able to send, hold, and manage money without going through a bank. Fifteen years later, some of the industry’s most significant developments involve banks doing that, on blockchains, for their own institutional clients.

JPMorgan now settles payments in its own deposit token on a public blockchain. BlackRock’s tokenized Treasury fund holds roughly $2.4 billion in assets, with two more products of the same kind already filed with the SEC. Visa and Mastercard let card issuers settle their daily obligations in stablecoins rather than wire transfers.

The industry that set out to disintermediate finance has, in large part, become the infrastructure finance now runs on.

Bitcoin emerged…