How institutions actually adopt blockchain: new research with Mastercard

Mastercard and the Sei Development Foundation have published "The foundations of institutional blockchain," a joint report on how banks and asset managers evaluate blockchain infrastructure and take it to production. It draws on 40+ interviews with subject-matter experts across payments, compliance, and blockchain infrastructure, alongside a review of the evaluation frameworks institutions already use.

The core finding: the technology stopped being the bottleneck. Aggregate capacity across major networks now tops ~3,400 transactions per second, roughly 100x 2019 levels. More than $27B in bonds, funds, deposits, and other assets has been tokenized on-chain, and BlackRock's tokenized Treasury fund passed $2.5B in AUM in May. What separates a pilot from production today is confidence that settlement is final and that governance and operations hold up under scrutiny.

The report maps how that confidence gets built. Institutions move through five gated stages (eligibility, validation, pilot, production, scale), each with its own decision owner and standard of proof. It scores what they evaluate across five pillars, from raw performance to governance and operational maturity. And the weighting shifts with the job: real-time payments put raw throughput first; treasury workflows flip that and score governance above everything. The report maps all six use cases.

"From Mastercard's perspective, institutional adoption requires more than innovation. Robust evaluation frameworks are essential to assess blockchain solutions across trust, scalability, compliance, and integration with existing ecosystems," said Christian Rau, SVP Digital Assets and Blockchain APEMEA at Mastercard.

"At Sei, we see performance becoming non-negotiable. Institutions are prioritizing blockchains that combine throughput, reliability, and interoperability with enterprise-grade expectations," said Jack Lipstone, Business Development Director at Sei Labs.

If you're evaluating blockchain infrastructure inside a financial institution, or building the infrastructure being evaluated, this is the current state of the playbook.