Recognizing Excellence: The 2026 Tearsheet Bankchain Awards Winners

As blockchain moves from the margins of finance toward the core of banking infrastructure, a mix of established and emerging institutions is shaping its development and deployment.

Tearsheet’s Bankchain Awards recognize the banks, fintechs, and technology providers advancing the adoption of digital assets, tokenization, stablecoins, and distributed ledger technology across financial services.

This year’s winners stand out for moving beyond experimentation and delivering real-world impact. Here are the organizations shaping the next chapter of banking and digital finance.

2026 Winners of the Bankchain Awards

Best Blockchain Infrastructure Platform: Rain

Rain earns the Best Blockchain Infrastructure Platform Award for building the connective layer between tokenized money and everyday commerce. Its onchain-native card issuance and settlement infrastructure allows businesses and consumers to spend tokenized funds through existing card networks at more than 150 million merchants worldwide, without interacting directly with blockchain complexity. As a Visa Principal Member, Rain has pioneered onchain settlement that operates seven days a week while reducing the capital requirements traditionally tied to card programs. The platform already supports millions of transactions across more than 150 countries and serves customers including Western Union and Nuvei. By making tokenized money usable within familiar payment experiences, Rain is helping translate blockchain innovation into practical financial infrastructure.

Innovation: Kinexys by J.P. Morgan

Kinexys by J.P. Morgan wins the Innovation Award for introducing JPM Coin, the first bank-issued deposit token to operate on public blockchain infrastructure. Designed for institutional clients, JPM Coin brings regulated commercial bank money on-chain, enabling near-instant, 24/7 settlement while remaining integrated with traditional banking systems. The launch builds on more than a decade of blockchain development at J.P. Morgan, whose Kinexys platform has processed over $4 trillion in transactions since its inception. By creating a new category of digital commercial bank money and addressing the gap between traditional deposits and onchain liquidity, Kinexys is helping define how institutions will move capital in a blockchain-enabled financial system.

Best Asset Tokenization: UR Technology

UR Technology receives the Best Asset Tokenization Award for its role in building the technical infrastructure that allows users to have access to tokenized deposits, which serve as a practical bridge between onchain finance and everyday financial activity. UR’s value lies in empowering an open economy, drawing connections between blockchain technology and traditional finance for everyone globally. It operates as a technology integration layer, connecting third‑party financial service providers with blockchain and traditional payment rails. Through these back‑to‑back integrations, the tokenized representation of seven major fiat currencies, each backed 1:1 by client top-up held in regulated Swiss IBAN accounts, can be used by users to seamlessly move cross-border, foreign exchange, and spend-using cards for everyday use. This model has gained meaningful traction, with the underlying ecosystem processing over $1.2 billion in volume and more than 5 million Mastercard transactions across 240,000 verified users in more than 50 countries. By integrating regulated financial products with global payment capabilities, UR expands the practical utility of digital assets in everyday finance.

Best Stablecoin Offering: PYUSD PayPal

PayPal stands out as the recipient of the Best Stablecoin Offering Award, a complementary recognition for PYUSD, which combines regulated 1:1 dollar backing, strong compliance standards, and expanding real-world utility across payments, settlement, and cross-border flows. Now available across 70 markets, PYUSD can be bought, held, sent, and converted within PayPal, moved across Venmo, external wallets, and multiple blockchains, and used for payments at PayPal checkout, where merchants gain faster access to funds. Its growing role in Xoom-enabled cross-border transfers is helping reduce settlement friction and dependence on traditional banking hours, while early integrations with payout partners in regions such as Africa and Asia-Pacific extend its reach into real-world remittance corridors. With optional rewards for holding, improving liquidity, and increasing use across consumer, merchant, and settlement flows, PYUSD is steadily positioning itself as a compliant, interoperable dollar-native stable value layer embedded within everyday global commerce.

Best Custodian: Anchorage Digital

Anchorage Digital is selected for the Best Custodian Award as a complimentary recognition for defining institutional-grade digital asset custody through federally chartered, security-first infrastructure that unifies crypto and fiat within a single regulated platform. As the first OCC-chartered crypto-native bank, it combines qualified custody, segregated key management, biometric and quorum-based approvals, insurance protection, and SOC-certified auditability to ensure both control and compliance at scale, while enabling fast, API-driven settlement and transparent reporting for institutional workflows. Beyond custody, Anchorage has expanded into a broader regulated financial layer — integrating fiat banking, global wires, staking, trading, and settlement — while advancing high-profile initiatives such as partnerships with BNY, Google Cloud, and Western Union’s USDPT issuance, positioning it as a core infrastructure provider bridging traditional finance and onchain markets.

Best Crypto Payments Infrastructure: WalletConnect Pay

WalletConnect Pay is named the Best Crypto Payments Infrastructure Award as a complimentary recognition for bringing stablecoin payments into physical retail at scale through a wallet-native checkout layer. Integrated with Ingenico’s global POS network, it enables customers to pay in stablecoins directly from their existing mobile wallets while merchants receive settlement through their usual payment providers without new hardware, card networks, or workflow changes. By embedding compliance, identity, and transaction logic into the wallet experience, it removes blockchain complexity at the point of sale and makes crypto acceptance feel identical to traditional card payments. With expanding POS integrations and support for networks like Solana, WalletConnect Pay is positioning stablecoin payments as an embedded, behind-the-scenes layer of everyday commerce infrastructure.