Four of the largest US commercial banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo — are building a shared tokenized deposit network through The Clearing House, the bank-owned payments company, according to a joint press release published Friday. The initiative, which The Wall Street Journal first reported, targets a first-half 2027 launch.

The participant roster is broader than earlier reporting suggested. BNY, BMO, Citizens Financial, Fifth Third, HSBC, Huntington, KeyBank, PNC, Regions, Santander, TD Bank, Truist, and U.S. Bank are all named in the release. A blockchain vendor has not yet been selected.

Network Architecture and Capabilities

The platform will enable on-chain clearing and settlement of tokenized deposits between participating banks, supporting 24/7 settlement and automated payment workflows. It will also serve as a connectivity layer linking blockchain activity to existing fiat rails, including The Clearing House’s own RTP® and CHIPS® networks, which together clear and settle more than $2 trillion daily.

Tokenized deposits are bank deposit claims recorded on a distributed ledger, backed one-for-one by reserves at the issuing bank. They carry the same FDIC eligibility and regulatory treatment as traditional deposits. Tokenized deposits are distinct from stablecoins, which are issued by non-bank entities and are backed by cash and Treasuries.

David Watson, President and CEO of The Clearing House, called the initiative “a big move for the banks” and said the industry faces a “radically different” future built around on-chain payments.

Executive Quotes From the Four Lead Banks

JPMorgan’s Global Co-Head of Payments Max Neukirchen said a “regulated market-infrastructure solution for clearing and settling tokenized deposits” is essential to keeping the payments ecosystem “stable, resilient, and effective.”

Citi’s Head of Services Shahmir Khaliq pointed to Citi Token Services — already running cross-border instant payments at scale — as a building block: “There is a critical need for The Clearing House to establish clearing infrastructure across member banks for both traditional and tokenized deposits facilitating industry-wide 24/7 and interoperable movement of cash and securities in the future.”

Wells Fargo CFO Mike Santomassimo said the initiative “boosts Wells Fargo’s ability to give our payments clients the benefits of blockchain along with the trust and stability expected from banks.”

Bank of America’s Head of Global Payments Solutions Mark Monaco called it “an important foundation for future growth” combining “the innovation of digital finance with the trust, scale, and settlement certainty of established bank payment infrastructure.”

The Stablecoin Backdrop

The announcement arrives as USDT and USDC together hold roughly $263 billion in circulating supply, per DefiLlama — a scale that bank executives have framed as a structural deposit-retention threat.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon publicly opposed stablecoin-yield provisions in the CLARITY Act earlier this month. The Clearing House network is the banking sector’s coordinated operational response: not just legislative opposition, but a competing product with comparable programmability built inside the regulated perimeter.

Several participants were already running individual tokenized deposit programs. Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, the firm’s blockchain unit whihc processes more than $5 billion daily, brought JPM Coin (JPMD) to Coinbase’s Base L2 for institutional clients earlier this year. Citi Token Services has been live for cross-border instant payments. BNY launched its own tokenized deposit service for institutions in January.

This announcement is a continuation of a broader arc. Earlier reporting this week covered JPMorgan and Citi’s bilateral tokenized deposit preparations. Friday’s release confirms the shared, multi-bank infrastructure layer sitting above those individual programs and broadens the participant list from four to more than a dozen named institutions.