Solidus Labs Research Reveals Rapid Growth in Digital-Asset Governance Roles Across Major U.S. Banks

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• 88% of major U.S. banks in the analysis opened or filled senior digital asset compliance, legal, or risk roles within the past six months - signaling that digital-asset governance has become mainstream across control functions.
  
• 75% of these U.S. roles were posted in just the last 90 days, underscoring the acceleration and urgency with which banks are building market integrity and digital asset oversight capabilities.
  
• Among the Big Five U.S. banks, 80% of these roles were hired at the Executive Director or VP level, underscoring how digital asset oversight is being elevated into senior control functions.

Digital-Asset Governance Goes Mainstream Across Major Financial Institutions

88% of Major U.S. Banks Are Now Hiring Senior Digital-Asset Compliance and Risk Leaders

Solidus Labs research shows that 2025 marks a hiring rally in digital asset compliance, legal, and risk roles across all major U.S. banks - and a rapidly accelerating trend among leading global banks. What began as limited, experimental digital asset initiatives has evolved into a strategic effort to build the expertise needed to oversee digital asset markets, tokenized products, and emerging hybrid market abuse patterns.

Major banks are no longer experimenting with digital assets, they are staffing up with urgency.

U.S. Banks Lead the Acceleration in Digital-Asset Compliance Hiring

Across the United States, essentially all major U.S. banks in the analysis have opened new digital asset compliance, legal, or risk positions within the past six months - including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and BNY Mellon - or had already hired such roles earlier in the year, as in the case of Goldman Sachs.

Many of these positions sit at the VP, Director, or Executive Director level and span financial-crime, legal, enterprise-risk, and advisory-compliance teams, all aligned to support emerging digital asset trading, custody, and tokenization initiatives.

Taken together, the current state of the U.S. market makes one thing clear: digital asset governance is now a standard component of control functions within major banks.

Global Banks Follow the Same Momentum in Digital-Asset Governance

Outside the U.S., the hiring rally is expanding across major banks in the UK, EU, and Switzerland, including HSBC, Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, UBS, and Santander.

More than two-thirds of surveyed global institutions have opened digital asset compliance, legal, or risk roles in the past six months, reflecting the widespread impact of MiCA in Europe, Hong Kong’s VATP licensing regime, and heightened global regulatory expectations.

These roles span AML and financial-crime teams, enterprise-risk functions, legal advisory groups, and market-integrity units - each reflecting the growing operational and regulatory complexity of digital asset activity.

The direction of travel is unmistakable: major banks are building digital asset control functions at scale.

The Digital-Asset Hiring Rally Exposes a Significant Skills Gap

The hiring surge is only half the story. The real challenge is not simply filling roles - it is finding professionals with the right expertise.

Digital asset supervision now requires hybrid knowledge across:

• On-chain analytics
• Smart-contract risks
• 24/7, retail-first trading behavior
• Digital-asset-specific abuse typologies
• Blockchain-based AML and wallet-behavior analysis

Traditional compliance and risk backgrounds alone are no longer sufficient. This is both a talent challenge and a skills challenge, and banks are increasingly confronting the limits of their current training pipelines.

Solidus Labs’ Trade Surveillance Academy Closes Digital Assets Skills Gap

The industry is converging on the same realization: hiring alone will not bridge the gap, building the right skills will.

As digital asset markets scale - characterized by fragmented venues and continuous 24/7 trading, the complexity of supervising market behavior and safeguarding market integrity is accelerating, banks need compliance and risk professionals who can analyze on- and off-chain data, interpret smart-contract behavior, detect digital asset market abuse, and assess cross-venue manipulation risks.

This is the exact skill and knowledge gap Solidus Labs built the Trade Surveillance Academy (TSA) to address. TSA provides specialized training, applied digital asset surveillance frameworks, and practical investigation techniques to upskill compliance teams, helping major banks close the skills gap that this hiring rally has brought into full focus.

How This Digital-Asset Governance Analysis Was Conducted

This analysis was conducted by Solidus Labs using publicly available information and structured review techniques. The research examined job postings, hiring patterns, and role descriptions across major U.S. banks, as well as leading global banks headquartered in the UK, EU, and Switzerland.

The review focused on roles that explicitly referenced digital assets, crypto, tokenization, DLT, blockchain, virtual assets, or similar keywords within compliance, legal, or risk functions. Only roles posted, active, or verifiably open within the last six months were included. Additional qualitative evidence was incorporated in cases where banks had previously hired digital asset compliance or legal leaders despite no new openings during the current review period.

The methodology is intentionally conservative, meaning actual global demand for digital asset compliance and risk talent is likely higher than the published findings.