Topic
Commercial bank deposits represented as tokens on a distributed ledger, enabling round-the-clock transfers; the bank-issued counterpart to stablecoins.
Bank of England sees no urgent need for a retail digital pound, a Deputy Governor said on 12 October 2026. It expects three dominant sterling stablecoins at about EUR 46 billion of demand each, so the field for new issuers is narrow.
Reality
OCBC says it is the first bank to run tokenised deposits for Ant International, settling the group's SGD and USD transfers between Singapore and Malaysia 24/7. The deployment takes OCBC's deposit-token work out of interbank tests on Swift's ledger and into a live corporate treasury.
Reality
HSBC's licensed Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, RedCoin, is due by year-end inside PayMe, an app with more than 3.3 million users. No coin has been issued yet, so that figure is the reach of Hong Kong's biggest lender, and demand for the token is still untested.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Lloyds, NatWest, Barclays and HSBC settled Britain's first interbank transfers of tokenised sterling deposits in three pilot transactions. The Bank of England favours such tokens over private stablecoins, yet it still sketches a system where the two convert at par.
Reality
Pablo Hernandez de Cos told the Fed's symposium that stablecoins cannot hold par across issuers or across chains, which puts the prudential bet on deposit tokens that stay bank liabilities settled in central bank money.
Reality