Tokenised deposits have quietly become real infrastructure. Several large institutions now settle corporate cash movements intraday on permissioned ledgers, with the deposit remaining a claim on the bank rather than becoming a bearer instrument.
The distinction people keep collapsing
A tokenised deposit is a bank liability with a new transfer mechanism. A stablecoin is a claim on an issuer's reserve pool. The legal, capital and insurance treatment of the two are not remotely the same, and conflating them produces bad analysis in both directions.
Interoperability is the whole game
Closed bank networks capture operational savings for their members and nothing else. Value accrues to the wider market only if these ledgers can settle against public-chain assets, which requires a legal bridge as much as a technical one. That work is underway and is slower than the engineering.
Watch which banks publish their settlement finality rules. Those documents tell you far more about readiness than any announcement.
The bank answer to stablecoins
Tokenised deposits keep balances inside the regulated banking perimeter while offering programmable settlement. That solves the regulator's problem more than the user's.
Interoperability is the obstacle: a token that only moves within one bank's network is an internal ledger upgrade, not a market.
