Thirty-Nine US State Bankers Associations Plan Industry-Owned Blockchain for Tokenised Deposits

Thirty-nine state bankers associations have formed the BankChain Alliance, a collaborative effort to build a shared blockchain network owned and governed by the banking industry itself rather than by a subset of large institutions. The planned infrastructure would support tokenised deposits, stablecoins, smart payments, and automated settlement, with a technology partner selection already under way and a 2027 launch target set.

The governance framing is the defining feature here. The Clearing House, which is owned by a handful of large banks, is pursuing interoperability between tokenised deposit systems that major institutions have already built internally. BankChain is oriented toward a much broader constituency, including community and regional banks that have not yet built anything and struggle to justify the investment without demonstrated demand. The alliance intends to be interoperable rather than a closed silo, positioning itself as a complement to rather than a replacement for existing networks such as Hazel and Cari, which are also active in the US market but lack the industry-ownership structure.

The model has European precedents worth watching. Germany’s Commercial Bank Money Token (CBMT), founded through that country’s banking associations, and the Great British Tokenised Deposits (GBTD) consortium, coordinated by UK Finance, both follow a similar industry-association governance logic. BankChain’s emergence suggests US community and regional banks are looking to those frameworks as a template for collective infrastructure investment where no single large incumbent has the incentive to build on their behalf.