The Bank for International Settlements published a report on Basel III, the risk assessment framework, which has a new segment for crypto-asset reporting. Only 19 out of 182 banks reported crypto-asset exposures at the end of 2021, and two are purely crypto banks. The banks are unlikely to be the largest, as their combined assets represent just 2.4% of all the banks that reported. In terms of risk exposures, crypto-assets represented 0.01% of all exposures.
The total of all crypto exposures was €9.4 billion ($10.7bn at the end of 2021). In context, the total market capitalization of crypto at the end of last year was $2.7 trillion. In other words, banks accounted for much less than one percent of crypto-assets. That said, there have been some significant bank announcements during 2022.
And of those 19 banks that had some exposure, three made up two-thirds of the figures and the top six banks accounted for 92% of the crypto-assets. Unsurprisingly, almost 90% of the crypto-assets were invested either in Bitcoin or Ether, although via a variety of mediums such as direct, through Grayscale trusts and ETFs. Most of the rest of the crypto were the tokens of other layer 1 blockchain networks, although there were smaller amounts in the USDC stablecoin and tokenized assets.
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