The most useful crypto product of the next few years will likely be offered to you by your local bank. Without a word, you will never learn its name.
I say that because of two things that happened on the same day last month, 24 September, on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
Two Remortgages and a Very Large Network
In Britain, two remortgage completions and a marketplace payment were settled using tokenised sterling deposits. They were the first live customer transactions of their kind, on infrastructure involving Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds, NatWest, Nationwide, Santander and Monzo. Two households changed mortgage and had no reason to notice anything unusual, which is rather the point.
In America, The Clearing House chose London firm Quant to supply the technology for its new network for tokenised deposits. ‘The Clearing House’ is owned by the big commercial banks and runs payment systems that move more than $2 trillion a day. The project was unveiled in June with 17 founding banks, including J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo and HSBC, and is due to open to them in the first half of 2027, Fintech Finance News reported.
So What Is a Tokenised Deposit?
It is your bank balance, recorded on a blockchain. That is all. The money is still a deposit at your bank, still the bank’s obligation to you, still under the same rules and protections as before. What changes is the plumbing. A payment can settle in seconds at any hour, and it can carry instructions, so money moves only when a condition is met, such as deeds changing hands.
A stablecoin looks similar but is not. A stablecoin is issued by a company, which holds reserves and promises to redeem each coin for a dollar. The question I now ask of any digital pound or dollar is dull. Whose promise is it? With a tokenised deposit it is my bank’s. With a stablecoin it is the issuer’s. Both can be perfectly sound. They are not the same promise, and the difference matters most when something goes wrong.
The Token That Ran Ahead
Now the part that will sound familiar. Quant has a token of its own, QNT. On 25 September, the day after the announcement, it was under $100, already up by about a third. By the start of this week, it was around $261.
Here is the awkward detail. Neither The Clearing House nor Quant has said whether the token will play any part in the new network, as CoinMarketCap’s report noted. Banks adopting the technology does not automatically mean banks are buying the token. The price has more than doubled on a contract whose terms, as far as the token goes, nobody outside the room has seen. It is also still well short of the record it set in 2021.
I wrote about the reverse case in Ripple Is Winning. Its Token Is Not, where the company kept succeeding and the coin went nowhere. This is the mirror image: the coin sprinting ahead of a network that does not open until next year. Put the two side by side, and the lesson is the same. A company and its token are separate things, and good news for one is only a rumour about the other until someone explains the link.
Where That Leaves Me
I do not own QNT, and I am not about to chase something that has more than doubled in under a fortnight. My impatience has views on this. It has been overruled.
What I am doing is quieter. I am paying attention to the plumbing, because this is the part of crypto that will reach people who have never bought a coin and never intend to. Japan’s regulator has approved a project in which its three largest banks aim to settle trade finance with stablecoins by March 2027. America’s banks are due to go live in the first half of that year. Britain’s have completed their first real transactions. None of that needs my permission or my money.
The revolution, it turns out, may arrive as a remortgage that completes on time. I can live with that. I have waited for enough solicitors.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, and confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for information and education only. It is not financial, investment or professional advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any investment. The Jacqueline Brand is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. The value of investments can fall as well as rise, and past performance is not a guide to future returns. Figures were correct at the time of publication. Always do your own research and consider speaking to a regulated adviser. Where cryptoassets are discussed, they are high risk and largely unregulated in the UK, and you could lose all the money you invest. The Collection
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