Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnAhmed BarakatSat, June 6, 2026 at 3:46 PM GMT+2 3 min readJPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo are building a shared Tokenized Deposit Network to challenge stablecoins. It goes through The Clearing House, targeting a first-half 2027 launch, and the Federal Reserve is the audience that matters most.The stated pitch is efficiency: instant 24/7 settlement, programmable payments, blockchain-speed money movement.The actual pitch is control: if banks own the tokenized settlement layer, there is no political or structural opening for a government-issued retail CBDC, and no oxygen left for stablecoin issuers in the institutional payment stack.Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your PortfolioStablecoins Killer? Tokenized Deposits vs. Fedwire, What the TDN Actually Does and Why Banks Want It NowA tokenized deposit is not a new asset. It is a regular bank deposit recorded on a shared ledger instead of a siloed bank ledger, same credit risk, same regulatory treatment, same accounting standards. What changes is the settlement infrastructure.Fedwire and RTP operate on batch cycles or near-real-time windows with hard cutoffs. The TDN settles on-chain, continuously, including weekends and federal holidays.That gap is exactly where stablecoins built their corporate use case. Treasury teams running cross-border settlements in USDC don’t care about monetary philosophy; they care that Circle’s rails run on Sunday at 2 a.m. and JPMorgan’s don’t.The TDN closes that gap without moving a dollar outside the regulated banking system.The infrastructure exists in fragments already. JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform processes institutional payments via JPM Coin on a private blockchain.The bank also launched a tokenized deposit token on Base, Coinbase’s public Layer 2, for institutional clients earlier in 2026, targeting cross-border payments, intraday liquidity, and programmable payouts. Citi’s Token Services runs real-time digital transfers between New York, London, and Hong Kong.The TDN is the interoperability layer that connects these siloed bank efforts into a single institutional liquidity pool, a Regulated Settlement Network at US banking scale.David Watson, CEO of The Clearing House, said the project is “a big move for the lenders” and that the industry faces a “radically different” future around on-chain payments.That framing is accurate. It is also strategically convenient because the banks proposing this network are the same institutions that would be most damaged by either a government-run CBDC or a stablecoin that captures institutional dollar flows.Terms and Privacy PolicyPrivacy & Cookie SettingsMore Info