Wall Street's Bitcoin race now has a scoreboard, and the standings are lopsided at the top and gridlocked just below it. According to Strategy CEO Phong Le, the biggest US banks are locked in a tight contest for second place on the company's Bitcoin Banking Adoption Index — with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Citi all scoring within three points of one another, while Fidelity holds a commanding lead over the entire field.

The Standings

The index grades 25 major banks on the depth of their Bitcoin trading, custody, and product offerings, with an initial overall score of 32% drawn from public data through July 10. Fidelity tops the table at 71%, a lead built on Fidelity Digital Assets — the custody arm it launched all the way back in 2018, when almost no peer was willing to make that bet.

Behind it, the gap narrows fast. BNY sits at 46%, Goldman Sachs trails narrowly at 45%, and JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup are all knotted at 43% — just two points behind Goldman. In other words, the fight for the runner-up spot is close enough that a single product launch could reorder it.

Structure, Not Sentiment

The index deliberately measures institutional plumbing rather than price enthusiasm. Bitcoin traded near $64,539 on Sunday, up about 1% over 24 hours — but the rankings track structural adoption: what each institution actually offers clients, not how bullish its executives sound. Michael Saylor, Strategy's executive chairman, framed the takeaway plainly when the index debuted on July 13, describing major-bank Bitcoin adoption as accelerating but still early at an overall 32%.

The contrast across the industry is stark. Recent record bank earnings show JPMorgan and Goldman trading desks already profiting from crypto-adjacent activity, while Vanguard has only recently begun planning its own crypto strategy — years after Fidelity built out custody — and smaller regional lenders have barely started at all.

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The Tokenization Wrinkle

One complicating factor sits just outside the index's frame. More than 15 banks are now competing on tokenization — moving traditional assets on-chain — an effort that largely sidesteps Bitcoin entirely. That means a bank could be aggressively building blockchain infrastructure while barely moving on this particular scorecard, and it raises a genuine question about how the index's gains get distributed as institutional crypto strategy fragments into Bitcoin-specific and tokenization-specific tracks.

What Decides Second Place

Le expects the picture to sharpen considerably by year-end. Goldman, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Citi each have multiple crypto initiatives slated for release this year — potentially including new exchange-traded products, custody expansions, or tokenization tools already in development. Whichever bank actually ships before December is likely to claim outright second place.

Strategy, as the largest corporate Bitcoin treasury holder, obviously has a stake in the outcome it's measuring — a caveat worth keeping in mind when reading a scorecard published by a company whose thesis depends on institutional adoption accelerating. Even so, the underlying data point stands on its own: at 32% overall, the biggest names in banking have built perhaps a third of the Bitcoin infrastructure the index thinks they eventually will.

Source: Reporting via BeInCrypto (Phil Haunhorst), based on Strategy’s Bitcoin Banking Adoption Index and public statements from Phong Le and Michael Saylor. Index scores are Strategy’s own assessments based on public data through July 10. This article is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice.