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When an international trucking company wanted to beat its competition for the industry's best drivers, it turned to its bank with a request: enable us to pay them the moment they pull into the warehouse. The bank came back with a two-pronged approach that uses geo-location to know the whereabouts of the semis and blockchain technology to make the instant payment. It worked as advertised and on top of that reduced the cross-border payment cost by 94 percent.
But this wasn't JPMorganChase helping FedEx; it was Vantage Bank of Texas, which has branches all over the state, and DX Express, a trucking company with rigs in Mexico and the U.S.
This was one of Vantage's 11 digital-asset projects in 2025, with CEO Jeff Sinnott behind each one. Others included tokenizing commercial loans and creating a hub for investors to access high-yielding alternate crypto-investments.
At the same time, Sinnott has had to keep the traditional side of the community bank happy. Vantage devotes 55 percent of its technology budget to business-as-usual needs and 45 percent to innovation. Revenue from digital projects hit $7 million in 2025, with estimated savings of another $12 million. Net income has more than tripled to $72 million from $23 million five years ago.
"We're in a golden opportunity," Sinnott said in an interview. "Barriers are being lowered." Blockchain's impact on community banks "not only levels the playing field, but it also actually puts those banks that are able to listen to their customers, and have the ability to respond, at a competitive advantage," he said.
Still, challenges persist, such as the regulatory clarity to move Vantage's proof-of-concept projects into real-world production. In March 2025, Vantage and its partner Custodia Bank created the first bank-issued stablecoin on a permissionless network, known as an Avit™, that was deployed on Ethereum. Vantage interchanges tokenized deposits for Avit once the transaction leaves the bank network. In the trucking example, that cross-border payment cost 28 cents, compared with $6.78 for an international wire, Sinnott said.
"Final clarity for tokenized deposits working with the current banking regulations is our last major hurdle in order to go fully live in production," he said.
The next step is convincing other community banks to join the Hazel Network Vantage is building with Custodia, which Sinnott said is expected to go into live testing in the second quarter. "We want to be a multi-generational bank," he said. "And so, we presented a strategy to the regulators seven years ago to bridge decentralized assets, tokenization and traditional finance."
