Speech by Mr Pablo Hernández de Cos, General Manager of the BIS, at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, 28 August 2026. Stablecoins versus tokenized deposits
I will first assess whether stablecoins and tokenized deposits uphold the monetary properties that anchor trust – singleness, interoperability and integrity. I will then explore the macro financial implications of their broader adoption.
Monetary properties
Both stablecoins and tokenized deposits use tokenization to transfer value on programmable rails. But their differences are of first-order importance for the monetary system.
Take singleness first. Assume Ben wants to transfer a dollar’s worth of stablecoins to Marie. Ben owns USDT (Tether), but Marie only accepts USDC (Circle). In order to make the transfer, Ben needs to sell USDT in the secondary market and use the proceeds to buy USDC, which he can then send to Marie. Since deviations from par in secondary markets are the norm – and sizeable under stress – this transaction may not go through at par. There is no mechanism that enforces singleness. By contrast, tokenized deposits are account-based bank liabilities recorded on a programmable platform; payments debit the payer’s balance and credit the payee’s balance, with interbank settlement though central bank accounts in the background. Hence in the tokenized deposit model, settlement in central bank money preserves singleness, under which claims denominated in that unit are redeemable at par with central bank money with finality. https://www.bis.org/speeches/20260828-pushing-monetary-frontier-stablecoins-and-tokenised-deposits
Bank for International Settlements
Pushing the monetary frontier: stablecoins and tokenised deposits | Bank for International Settlements
Speech by Mr Pablo Hernández de Cos, General Manager of the BIS, at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, 28 August 2026.
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