Tokenized deposits: the third kind of stablecoin most people forget

Most stablecoin coverage treats the market as USDC vs USDT. A third category has been quietly building in the background: tokenized bank deposits. JPMorgan, Citi, HSBC, DBS, and a small Japanese regional bank called Hokkoku have all shipped them. They don't trade on Uniswap, don't appear on CoinMarketCap, and -- in JPMorgan's case alone -- already settle more than $10B a day on the platform now called Kinexys Digital Payments (the November 2024 rebrand of JPM Coin / Onyx).

Four types of dollar-on-chain

The word “stablecoin” is doing too much work. There are four legally distinct things hiding inside it.

The middle row -- tokenized deposits -- is where banks are putting most of their actual production volume, and where this guide focuses. That's the part of the market that gets the least coverage relative to its size. EUR CoinVertible sits in the private-stablecoin row even though Société Générale is bank-affiliated: it's issued by SG-FORGE under an Electronic Money Institution licence as a MiCA e-money token, not as a deposit liability on SocGen's balance sheet.

Why tokenized deposits are not stablecoins (legally)

A USDC or USDT user holds a claim on the issuer's reserve pool. Circle and Tether are not banks. Their tokens are not deposits. A bankruptcy of the issuer is, in principle, a credit event against the holder, and customer protections (deposit insurance, lender of last resort) don't apply.

A tokenized deposit is a completely different legal object. When a JPMorgan corporate client holds a JPM Coin balance, that balance is a deposit liability on JPMorgan's balance sheet -- the same line item as a regular checking account, just represented on-chain. It's covered by the same regulatory regime, the same supervision, and (within insurance limits) the same depositor protections. The chain part is plumbing; the legal substance is bank deposit.

That distinction matters because it explains both why banks are building these and why corporates use them. The banks aren't ceding their position to Circle and Tether -- they're wrapping their existing product in better plumbing, and keeping the seigniorage, supervision relationship, and customer lock-in that come with it.

Three patterns emerging in tokenized-deposit issuance

Group the production deployments by who's issuing and who they serve, and three distinct patterns appear.

1. Mega-bank B2B (JPM Coin, Citi Token Services, HSBC, DBS)

The largest and most mature. Single bank, proprietary chain or permissioned ledger, corporate customers only. The pitch is 24/7 settlement, intra-bank instant transfer, programmable sweeps, and cross-border within the bank's footprint without going through correspondent rails.

• JPM Coin / Kinexys Digital Payments (JPMorgan, US) -- the original, rebranded from JPM Coin / Onyx in November 2024. $10B+ daily transaction volume on the underlying Kinexys network per JPMorgan's public materials. Publicly-named institutional users include Siemens, Ant International, BlackRock, and FedEx.
• Citi Token Services -- multi-currency tokenized deposits for Citi's institutional clients. Maersk is a flagship customer for 24/7 trade-payment settlement.
• HSBC Tokenized Deposits -- piloting in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the UK. Asia-first roadmap.
• DBS Token Services -- Singapore-anchored, on an EVM-compatible chain. Among the more aggressive Asian deployments on a public-chain-adjacent stack.

Common features across this group: B2B only, no retail, no public-chain trading, very large per-transaction sizes. None of these touch consumer remittance directly today, and most won't for years.

2. Multi-bank common rail (Progmat)

The model where one infrastructure provider issues bank-grade tokenized deposits on behalf of multiple banks, each retaining their own claim and deposit-insurance umbrella. More operationally complex than a single-bank product, but a smaller bank can plug into a shared rail rather than building its own.

Progmat (Mitsubishi UFJ Trust Bank, Japan) is the canonical example. Multiple Japanese banks can each issue their own deposit token on a common Progmat-managed substrate, in compliance with Japan's revised Payment Services Act (2023 amendments effective 2023–2024). Each token stays inside its issuing bank's deposit-insurance regime, but the rail is shared. The strategic logic is consortium-style infrastructure: build the rail once, give every regional bank the option to ship a deposit token without re-implementing the stack.

Société Générale's EUR CoinVertible is sometimes grouped here in popular coverage, but it's legally different: EURCV is issued by SG-FORGE under a MiCA Electronic Money Institution licence as an e-money token, not as a deposit liability on SG's balance sheet. It belongs in Category 1 (private stablecoin, regulated EMI-issued sub-shape), not here. The confusion is widespread enough that it's worth saying explicitly.

3. Regional retail (Tochika)

The outlier. Most tokenized deposits target enterprise treasury; Hokkoku Bank's Tochika, launched in Ishikawa Prefecture in April 2024, targets individuals making small payments in a specific local economy. It's tied to a regional commercial-area revitalisation push as much as it is a payments product, which is not a use case any of the JPM Coin / DBS deployments cover.

Strategically, Tochika is interesting because it answers a question the mega-bank model can't: does a tokenized deposit work as retail money, when the issuer is small enough to also be a local economic actor? The honest read is too early to call -- the pilot is geographically narrow -- but no other production deployment is even running the experiment at this scale.

Why banks are doing this now

Tokenized deposits have been discussed in research papers for the better part of a decade. Production deployment accelerated between 2023 and 2026 for three reasons that compounded.

USDC and USDT got too large to ignore. Total private stablecoin supply crossed $200B in 2024 (per DeFiLlama timeseries) and corporates started moving real treasury balances onto USDC for 24/7 settlement. Banks had a concrete answer to “why should we bother” -- because the alternative is watching the seigniorage on those balances leave the banking system.

Regulation gave the asset a defined shape. Four frameworks landed between 2023 and 2025 and each created a legal home for tokenized bank money: Japan's revised Payment Services Act (2023 amendments effective 2023–2024), MiCA in the EU (ART/EMT provisions effective 30 June 2024, CASP provisions effective 30 December 2024), Hong Kong's stablecoin regime (effective August 2025), and the US GENIUS Act (signed July 2025). Banks could ship tokenized deposits as a compliant product line rather than a regulatory experiment.

The technology stack matured. Permissioned EVM-compatible chains, programmable wallets, and institution-grade custody let banks ship without having to build an L1 from scratch. JPMorgan's Onyx is the exception; most newer deployments lean on existing rails rather than reinvent them.

Why the Asia frontier is moving faster

The Asian deployments -- Tochika, Progmat, DBS, HSBC's HK/SG pilots, Standard Chartered Hong Kong -- are denser and more advanced relative to size than the European or US equivalents. Three structural reasons.

• Regulatory clarity arrived earlier. Japan and Singapore both had concrete legal regimes for tokenized bank money before the US did. Banks could plan multi-year deployments against a stable rule set.
• The bank-fintech split is sharper. In the US, a corporate treasurer who wants 24/7 settlement can use Circle, Stripe, or a US-regulated payments provider. In Japan and most of Asia, the equivalent is a bank relationship -- so the bank has to provide the on-chain version or lose the relationship.
• Cross-border within Asia is a high-value target. DBS, HSBC, Standard Chartered, and Citi all run large intra-Asia corporate flows that are still correspondent-banked. Tokenized deposits route around that stack inside the bank's own footprint.

What tokenized deposits are not, today

Three things they are routinely confused with, and aren't.

They are not retail cross-border money. Tochika is the only meaningful retail deployment, and it's intentionally hyper-local. A worker in Manila cannot receive a JPM Coin balance from a US sender today. The product surface for retail cross-border remittance is still USDC, USDT, and the regulated fintech rails (Wise, Remitly, etc.) we cover in the live calculator.

They are not interoperable across issuers. A JPM Coin balance does not move natively to a Citi Token Services wallet today. Each is a closed loop on the issuing bank's ledger. Progmat is the most credible attempt at cross-issuer interoperability, and it's a single-country consortium so far. SWIFT-equivalent multi-issuer routing for tokenized deposits doesn't exist at scale yet.

They are not a USDC / USDT replacement in their current form. Tokenized deposits compete with USDC and USDT for institutional treasury balances on specific corridors and within specific banks. They do not -- and probably won't for years -- compete for the on-chain retail USD use case that USDT dominates in Argentina, Turkey, Nigeria, or the Philippines.

How tokenized deposits fit alongside Tempo, Plasma, and Tether

Read together, the three pieces in this series describe roughly the entire production stablecoin landscape as of 2026:

• Private stablecoins (USDC, USDT) split into a regulated developed-market camp and an emerging-market retail camp, each with a purpose-built chain (Tempo, Plasma). Covered in Two stablecoin worlds.
• Tether sits inside that emerging-market camp but is pivoting into a broader shadow-bank shape -- USDT plus USAT plus Plasma plus reserves plus infrastructure. Covered in Tether's strategy.
• Tokenized deposits -- this piece -- are the banking-system response. Not a competitor to USDC/USDT for the retail crypto user, but a competitor for the corporate balance, and a hedge for the banking system as a whole against losing those balances to non-bank issuers.

Each of the three sees a different market as the centre of gravity, which is why none of them has been a clean winner so far. The most likely 2030 state is all three existing in parallel, each dominant in the segment its issuer is best positioned to serve.

What it means for US→Philippines remittance

For the specific corridor we cover, the practical implication is: tokenized deposits don't change anything today, and likely don't change much before 2028. None of the production deployments above touches retail US→PH consumer flow. The closest contender is USDC via Coinbase to Coins.ph on the regulated-rails side, and that's a private stablecoin route, not a tokenized-deposit route.

The medium-term scenarios worth watching:

• Project Nexus is actually the more consequential PH-corridor development than any tokenized-deposit deployment. It's the BIS-led multilateral real-time-payment connector that links the Philippines (PESONet + InstaPay) with India (UPI), Singapore (FAST), Thailand (PromptPay), Malaysia (DuitNow), and Indonesia. BSP's onboarding target is mid-2027. Nexus is a different rail-type than tokenized deposits -- bank-payment-system interoperability rather than tokenized commercial-bank money -- but it touches the PH side of cross-border flow much sooner than any tokenized-deposit product will. The United States is not a Nexus participant.
• BSP's Project Agila in the Philippines targets B2B wholesale tokenization, not retail. If it eventually extends to a peso-denominated retail tokenized deposit through Philippine banks, that would be the recipient-side leg of a future tokenized-deposit remittance route.
• Asia-corridor mega-bank deposit tokens -- DBS, HSBC, Standard Chartered -- are likely to ship Asia-to-Asia retail-ish products before US-to-Asia consumer products. The Philippines is a plausible second-wave market.
• Progmat-style multi-bank rails are the easiest path to a US bank shipping a tokenized USD deposit that can settle into an Asian bank's tokenized local currency. That stack does not exist end-to-end today.

Until any of those land in production for retail consumers, the practical route for a US→PH sender is unchanged. The live calculator keeps tracking USDC, Wise, Remitly, and Western Union -- and will keep adding rails the moment one of them becomes a real consumer option for this corridor.

Companion pieces: Two stablecoin worlds: Tempo, Plasma (private-stablecoin chain-level politics), Tether's strategy (the largest private-stablecoin issuer), and GENIUS Act, CLARITY Act (the US regulatory frame that overlaps with the bank-issuance story).

This guide is editorial framing on a fast-moving regulatory and product surface. Specific product names, volumes, and dates reflect public reporting as of the last-updated date in the page header; any of them can move quickly, and the framing will be revisited when material changes land.