One of the most significant new COBOL projects in 2025 was the integration of a new COBOL front-end into the GNU Compiler Collection. There are indeed quite many new projects being started in COBOL, though they primarily focus on modernization and integration with contemporary technologies rather than traditional greenfield development. Also not forget some cloud providers now offer "COBOL as a service" (see e.g. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/m2/latest/userguide/what-is-m2.h...).
By "new COBOL projects" I mean green-field development of entirely new projects written in that language - not the continued development of existing COBOL codebases, or development of tools which interact with COBOL code.
As an aside, the article you linked to is pretty obvious AI slop, even aside from the image ("blockchin infarsucture" and all). Some of the details, like claims that MIT is offering COBOL programming classes or that banks are using COBOL to automatically process blockchain loan agreements, appear to be entirely fabricated.
> There are indeed quite many new projects being started in COBOL
No.
You have to put this relative to projects started in other languages, at which points new projects started in COBOL is even less than a rounding error, it probably wouldn't result in anything other than 0 with a float.
And everyone with relevant fintech project experience knows that new projects on the existing core banking systems are started all the time and that COBOL continues to be a relevant language (whether we like it or not).