Coverage that says "tokenised money" without saying which kind is blurring 3 instruments with different balance-sheet locations, different regulators, and different natural owners. The split determines who backs what, and the backing map is one of the most reliable tells in the whole displacement debate.
The three instruments
- Tokenised deposits are bank liabilities on a shared ledger. The money never leaves the issuing bank's balance sheet, deposit insurance and prudential supervision apply as before, and transfers between banks settle through interbank arrangements. Covered from first principles in the tokenised deposits chapter.
- Stablecoins are claims on a non-bank issuer backed by segregated reserves. Funds leave the banking system's deposit base and sit in bills and repo, which is exactly why banks treat stablecoin adoption as deposit flight and why regulators wrote bespoke regimes for them; see payment stablecoins.
- Tokenised MMFs (money-market funds) are securities, not money: yield-bearing fund shares increasingly used as collateral that moves like money. They cannot be a payment instrument in the regulatory sense, and their production role is the collateral seat, with more than 120 firms in the GDF and ISDA workstreams on tokenised MMF collateral as of July 2026.
Who backs which, and why
The pattern in who builds what is close to clean self-interest, which is what makes it informative.
Banks build tokenised deposits, because the instrument preserves their funding. The production evidence is now substantial. Kinexys by J.P. Morgan reports average daily volume above 7 billion dollars and more than 4 trillion dollars processed cumulatively as of late June 2026, on the bank's own disclosure, with KB Kookmin opening client payments across 10 USD corridors on the rail in July 2026 (Ledger Insights). Partior, the Singapore-headquartered interbank network founded by DBS, J.P. Morgan, and Temasek with Standard Chartered and Deutsche Bank later aboard, runs USD, EUR, and SGD legs as of late 2025. Standard Chartered's tokenised-deposit service with Ant International's Whale platform has been in production since December 2025 across HKD, CNH, USD, and SGD. HSBC's Tokenized Deposit Service expanded to the US in April 2026. And the consortium response arrived on 9 July 2026, when Swift declared its blockchain-based shared ledger ready for use with 17 banks set to pilot tokenised cross-border payments, a roster whose Asia weight is notable: DBS, OCBC, UOB, MUFG, ANZ, Standard Chartered, and HSBC all on the list (Swift). The BIS's Project Agorá, which settled real money across 6 currencies including yen and won in its July 2026 phase with 5 central banks and more than 20 institutions, is the official-sector blessing of the same architecture: tokenised central-bank reserves settling against tokenised deposits.
Non-banks build stablecoins, because the instrument lets them hold the float. Circle and Tether at global scale, and in Asia a licensing wave that is more advanced than the US one in practice: Hong Kong's Stablecoins Ordinance commenced 1 August 2025 and produced its first 2 licensees on 10 April 2026, HSBC and Anchorpoint, the Standard Chartered (Hong Kong), HKT, and Animoca Brands joint venture whose HKDAP was reported in late July 2026 to be weeks from public issuance on Ethereum mainnet. Japan's JPYC has crossed from licensing into supply-chain payments, with logistics operator AZ-COM Maruwa paying 2,300 partners in the yen stablecoin as of July 2026. Korea's won-stablecoin bill was heading for an accelerated September 2026 reintroduction as of late July. Singapore finalised its single-currency stablecoin framework in August 2023, and the implementing legislation was still pending as of the latest reporting, a slower conversion from framework to licences than Hong Kong's. The US GENIUS Act, enacted 18 July 2025, does not bite until the earlier of January 2027 or 120 days after final rules, and no federal issuer licences existed as of August 2026, with the OCC's proposed rule published in March 2026 and comment periods only recently closed.
Asset managers build tokenised MMFs, because fund shares are their product: BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's Benji complex anchor the category, and the collateral use case is where they intersect the payments story, as the settlement-adjacent asset the repo and margin world actually wants to hold.
The interesting entrants are the ones crossing lanes. Banks joining stablecoin ventures (Standard Chartered via Anchorpoint, HSBC issuing directly) are hedging the deposit-flight scenario by owning the thing that causes it. Card networks, covered next in Part 6, are backing all 3 instruments at once, which is the clearest statement available that they consider the settlement asset a commodity and the orchestration above it the business.
Why the distinction decides corridors
Regulation allocates each instrument a territory. Tokenised deposits work where both counterparties bank inside the perimeter, which is why they own treasury and intercompany flows and are advancing in bank-intermediated B2B. Stablecoins work where a corridor crosses perimeters, or where one side has no banking relationship worth the name, which is why their volume lives in cross-border B2B and the unlinked remittance corridors of Part 4. Tokenised MMFs work wherever collateral does. The three-way split is not a taxonomy for its own sake; it is the corridor map.