BIS General Manager Backs Tokenised Deposits Over Stablecoins at Jackson Hole

Pablo Hernández de Cos, General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), used a keynote at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium on 28 August 2026 to set out a clear analytical preference for tokenised deposits over stablecoins as the better path for modernising the monetary system. The speech framed the choice through two foundational properties: a common unit of account and the singleness of money, meaning all instruments denominated in a currency must be redeemable at par into central bank money with finality. Stablecoins, he argued, struggle to meet these tests.

Hernández de Cos illustrated the singleness problem with a concrete example: if one party holds Tether (USDT) and a counterparty only accepts Circle (USDC), the transfer requires a secondary-market sale rather than a seamless par exchange. That friction is structurally different from the frictionless par-switching between commercial bank deposits that the existing two-tier system delivers. Tokenised deposits, by contrast, sit within the supervised intermediary layer and inherit the trust architecture anchored by central bank money, making them a more promising vehicle for applying distributed ledger technology (DLT) and programmable rails to existing monetary infrastructure.

The speech acknowledged that the current two-tier system carries its own burdens, including patchy interoperability across intermediaries and platforms, constrained competition, and inefficient cross-border payments. The BIS General Manager sketched a coexistence scenario in which both instruments operate, but indicated this would require design choices that preserve singleness, liquidity elasticity at the system level, and financial integrity. The speech also noted Wyoming’s issuance of the Frontier Stable Token (FRNT) as a public stablecoin, framing it as emblematic of an active policy frontier rather than a model to endorse.

For operators, the signal from the BIS’s most senior figure is that the institutional consensus is consolidating around tokenised deposits as the reform vehicle most compatible with the existing monetary architecture, while stablecoins face a structurally harder argument to make with regulators focused on singleness and systemic trust.