Banks and quietly creating deposit tokens, but history is painful.
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JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo are building a shared tokenized deposit network, operated by The Clearing House, the payments company the large banks already own together. The plan, first reported in June, would convert commercial deposits into tokens that move between member banks around the clock, with a target launch in the first half of 2027 and multinational corporates as the first users. “This is a big move for the banks,” Clearing House CEO David Watson said of the project.
The product brief covers programmable treasury, real-time liquidity management and cross-border payments, with multinational corporates first in line. JPMorgan payments co-head Max Neukirchen described the need as a regulated market-infrastructure solution for clearing and settling tokenized deposits, and the roster quoted beside him, Citi’s Shahmir Khaliq, Bank of America’s Mark Monaco, Wells Fargo’s Mike Santomassimo, runs the dollar’s actual plumbing. Arrayed against them sits roughly $263 billion of stablecoins already in circulation, organized, as of this month, into a consortium of its own.
Each of these banks has spent years tokenizing money alone. The new fact is the word shared. An interbank token is the first product banks have proposed that competes with stablecoins on the ground stablecoins actually occupy, and it arrives with a problem stablecoins never had to solve: getting four of the most competitive institutions on earth to run one ledger.
Why the solo projects stalled at the bank’s front door
The single-bank versions work, inside their walls. JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform now averages more than $7 billion a day and has processed over $4 trillion since launch, and its JPMD deposit token went into general availability on Base in November 2025. Citi Token Services runs live in the US, UK, Singapore and Hong Kong and has moved billions of dollars through Citi’s own network.
The limitation sits in the design. A JPMorgan token is a claim on JPMorgan, transferable among JPMorgan clients. As Brookings’ Nellie Liang, the former Treasury under secretary, put it in April, interbank settlement of tokenized deposits on private blockchains “does not exist.” A corporate treasurer whose suppliers bank elsewhere cannot pay them with it, which is to say the token fails at the one thing money is for. Scale confirms the point: CHIPS, the Clearing House system these same banks use today, settled an average of $2 trillion a day in 2025. The most successful bank token network on earth runs at one-third of one percent of that.
Fedwire, the Federal Reserve’s settlement service, averaged another $4.6 trillion a day in 2025. Those two numbers define the arena. Any bank token network that matters has to interoperate with, and eventually pull flow from, systems that clear more value before Tuesday lunch than every blockchain on earth clears in a quarter. The banks understand that scale better than anyone, which is presumably why they handed the project to the operator of CHIPS instead of to a startup.
The consortium record cuts both ways
Bank cooperatives have one spectacular modern success. Zelle, owned by seven of the same banks through Early Warning Services, moved $1.2 trillion in 2025 across more than 2,300 institutions, its second consecutive trillion-dollar year. Zelle worked because the threat was existential and shared, the operator already existed, and every member needed the same defense against Venmo at the same time. Zelle also marks the format’s ceiling: it took a shared subsidiary and a real fear of irrelevance to make banks route free payments to each other, and the product is still only person-to-person transfers. Deposit tokens ask far more of the members: common standards on programmability, interoperable compliance, and, hardest of all, exposure to one another’s balance sheets.
The rest of the genre reads like a warning label. The trade-finance consortium we.trade, backed by HSBC, Deutsche Bank and Santander, entered insolvency in 2022. Marco Polo, backed by BNY and Commerzbank, went insolvent in February 2023. Contour, built by nine banks to digitize letters of credit, shut down in late 2023 while processing a few dozen transactions a month. Fnality, the bank-owned settlement venture, went live with sterling payments in December 2023 and remains at controlled-pilot scale, even as Bank of America and Citi joined its $136 million Series C last September. Two of the four banks building the Clearing House network are simultaneously funding a competing settlement consortium, which tells you how much conviction any single design commands.
There is even a precedent for this exact product at smaller scale. The USDF Consortium, a group of community banks formed in 2022 to mint tokenized deposits on a shared blockchain, still describes that mission on its website; what it has stopped doing is making news, with little public activity since its chief executive testified to Congress in 2024. Bank-minted tokens that move between banks have been legal, designed and attempted for four years. What they have never been is demanded at scale by anyone’s clients, which is the demand problem the megabanks are now betting they can outspend.
The failures share a pattern: consortia die when the pain is asymmetric and the operator is new. The Clearing House network has Zelle’s two structural advantages, a standing operator with CHIPS-grade governance and a threat that now lands on every member at once. What it lacks is time.
The design problem is credit, and the deadline is 2027
A shared token network has to answer a question single-bank tokens dodge: when a Bank of America token sits in a Citi client’s wallet overnight, who is exposed to whom, and when does the claim settle in central bank money? Liang’s Brookings analysis identifies exactly this gap, and it is why Fnality anchored itself in an omnibus account at the Bank of England. The Clearing House brings decades of netting and settlement machinery to the problem, which is a real advantage. It also brings member banks who compete for the same corporate clients they would now share rails with, and a Federal Reserve settlement layer that still closes on weekends.
Meanwhile the competition ships. Open USD intends to be live in 2026; the bank network targets the first half of 2027. Even inside the member banks, enthusiasm is calibrated. Bank of America’s payments chief Mark Monaco has noted that clients are not beating down the door for tokenized deposits, at the same bank whose CEO sizes the deposit threat in the trillions. Both statements are true, and together they explain the project: the demand is early, the stakes are the funding model, so the banks are building ahead of the demand for once.
The banks proved a decade ago that each of them could tokenize a deposit. The test was always whether money could leave one bank as a token and arrive at another as money. Venmo pushed them into building Zelle together. It took a 140-member stablecoin consortium to push them onto one ledger. The 2027 date, and the trade-finance graveyard behind it, will show whether shared fear can hold four banks together long enough to matter.
