By Ray Birch
SARTELL, Minn.— For St. Cloud Financial Credit Union, the real significance of surpassing 10 Bitcoin in member safekeeping isn’t the number itself—it’s what EVP/Chief Lending Officer Chase Larson believes it signals about a much bigger risk for credit unions: many still have no meaningful crypto strategy, even as large banks and outside platforms move aggressively to capture what could become the next layer of payments, deposits and member relationships.
Larson, whose $425-million St. Cloud Financial has been building toward its crypto offering for roughly five years, said the Minnesota credit union’s early traction—now more than 12 Bitcoin held in member vaults after a quiet, controlled rollout—has reinforced his view that digital assets are not a fad, and that credit unions waiting on the sidelines risk repeating a familiar mistake.
“Credit unions need to get off zero,” Larson said. “It’s fascinating to me the amount of credit union leaders that still think that this is a fad or that it’s going to go away.”
That concern remains widespread. At the recent VeleraLIVE conference in Orlando, an audience of more than 2,000 was asked how many had a strategy for stablecoins or crypto, and very few hands went up.
What worries Larson most is not simply whether members buy Bitcoin, but who ultimately owns the wallet and the data.
“The person who owns the wallet in the future will own the relationship,” he said, arguing that tokenized money and digital assets will increasingly sit outside the traditional financial institution model.
In his view, that creates a far more serious long-term threat than many executives realize.
“This is the biggest threat to our industry and we need to act,” Larson said, pointing to the rise of crypto exchanges pursuing bank charters, the growth of stablecoins, and partnerships that increasingly let consumers move from crypto to fiat seamlessly.
“With digital assets—Bitcoin, stablecoins—I’m not needed. It’s a decentralized ledger,” he noted.
Education First Approach
That helps explain why St. Cloud Financial did not want a crypto product that simply pushes members to a third-party app or exchange. Larson said the credit union’s strategy has centered on education first—for leadership, staff, members and the community—followed by what he calls “safe keeping” inside the credit union ecosystem.
Chase Larson
“I would not outsource my checking accounts to Wells Fargo, so, why would I outsource my wallet to a third party?” he said. “Don’t just vendor your way out of this.”
Instead, St. Cloud partnered with DaLand CUSO, which Larson said built a core-centric solution called Coin2Core that sits on the front end of the credit union’s core rather than relying on a simple API handoff. That structure, he said, is designed to keep custody, member data and future transaction flows closer to the credit union rather than disintermediating the institution.
For now, the offering at SCFCU is intentionally narrow. Larson said the CU launched the product in its live core in June 2024 with a small group of testers, then rolled it out to members in a controlled way in late February and early March. The initial milestone was 10 Bitcoin in the first 30 days, a threshold he said mattered less because of the raw balance sheet size and more because it validated years of member research.
St. Cloud, which has about 28,000 members, has surveyed members on crypto interest for the last four years, and Larson said roughly 20% on average either owned crypto or planned to.
“The 10 in the short amount of time proves out that our strategy is working,” he said. “The data we were receiving from our membership was accurate.”
Members Want To Work With Their CU
Just as important, Larson said, the early response appears to support a thesis many credit unions have discussed but few have tested: that members may trust their credit union more than an exchange when it comes to safekeeping digital assets. He said the issue is not just cybersecurity, but succession, service and real-world access.
“If I hold the assets out on an exchange, then something happens to me, my wife is not going to be able to get access,” he said, recounting one family’s years-long struggle to retrieve assets from a large exchange after a death. By contrast, he said, a credit union can offer members “somebody they can call,” and family members “somebody they can come in and see.”
That, Larson said, is where cooperative trust and branch-based service can still matter in a digital-asset world.
The current model is a safekeeping or “vaulting” approach, with assets held off-balance sheet and members maintaining control of the assets rather than the credit union transacting on their behalf. But Larson made clear St. Cloud sees this as only the first phase. The roadmap, he said, includes Bitcoin Lightning Network access for payments, digital asset buying and selling through a “waterfall” structure that first looks inside the credit union before going out to an exchange, and eventually lending against digital assets—all delivered alongside traditional products from the core. Larson noted the platform will allow the CU, once regulation catches up, to “flip a switch and have it be on balance sheet if we choose.”
The platform was examined by NCUA in the fourth quarter of 2025 and the CU plans to expand access over time,
For Larson, that future is exactly why the conversation can’t remain theoretical for much longer. Whether or not a credit union wants to be a first mover, he argues, every institution now needs a real strategy—not because crypto is trendy, but because the rails underneath payments, value storage and member engagement may be changing faster than many executives think.
“Money is going to become streaming. Value is going to become tokenized,” Larson said. “We can’t be asleep at the wheel with this technological innovation.”