Deposit token

A deposit token is the most conservative radical idea in payments: take the commercial bank deposit, the instrument that already holds most of the world’s money, and issue it on a shared ledger. Nothing about the claim changes. The holder still holds bank money, on the issuing bank’s balance sheet, inside banking regulation. What changes is the form: the deposit becomes a token that transfers with finality in seconds, around the clock, and can carry conditions in code.

That continuity is the point, and it is why banks that would never issue a stablecoin are issuing deposit tokens. A stablecoin issuer must build a segregated reserve and, under regimes like MiCA and the GENIUS Act, obtain a specific authorization. A bank issuing a deposit token is doing what its charter already permits, taking deposits, in a new medium. The reserve is the bank itself. (The full comparison lives at tokenized deposits; regulators’ preference for the structure connects to singleness of money.)

Who is live

The reference implementation is JPMorgan’s JPMD, a USD deposit token for institutional clients that launched on Base, a public Ethereum-compatible network, in November 2025, following a pilot whose participants included Coinbase, Mastercard, and B2C2. It settles around the clock, near-instantly, and a euro version awaits EU approval. Citi Token Services runs tokenized deposits for institutional cash management across Citi’s own network. Consortium work, most visibly the UK’s tokenised sterling deposit pilot, is testing the harder problem: tokens moving between banks.

The one-bank boundary

The limitation is written into the instrument. A deposit token is a claim on its issuing bank, so it circulates frictionlessly among that bank’s customers and stops at the bank’s edge. A transfer to a customer of another bank requires interbank settlement underneath, and a world of many single-bank token networks recreates, on new technology, the fragmentation payments already suffer. Whether deposit tokens from different banks can be made interchangeable at par, always and automatically, is the open design question behind the consortium pilots and the BIS unified-ledger agenda.

For institutions, deposit tokens and stablecoins are not rivals so much as different answers to “whose claim do you want to hold”: one bank’s balance sheet or one issuer’s reserve. Payment designs increasingly assume both will circulate, and route between them by policy.