Tokenised deposit

The holder's claim is unchanged: money owed by a regulated bank, inside whatever deposit insurance and supervision already applied. What changes is that the record can move between institutions in minutes and can carry conditions — payment on delivery, release on a date — that a book entry cannot.

Why the legal question came first

Every such project stalls until a regulator says what the instrument is. Canada's Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions settled it in September 2026 with a formulation worth quoting for its generality: the underlying technology of a financial product does not determine its legal nature. Tokenised deposits, it said, are not legally distinct from traditional deposits.

That sentence is what lets a bank proceed. A deposit that is legally a deposit sits inside existing capital and insurance arrangements. One whose status is unsettled forces every participant to reserve against a possibility none of them can price.

How it differs from a stablecoin

• The issuer is a supervised bank, and the claim is a deposit rather than a claim on a reserve pool.
• It stays inside deposit insurance and bank supervision, rather than beside them under a separate regime.
• It is usually permissioned, circulating between known institutions rather than to any holder of an address.
• It competes with stablecoins by conceding nothing to them — the point is to gain the settlement mechanism without leaving the regulatory perimeter.

Where the difficulty actually sits

Not in issuing the token but in what happens between banks. A deposit at one institution is not a deposit at another, so a transfer is still an interbank settlement with all the arrangements that implies. Projects therefore begin, as Canada's did, with moving tokenised deposits between institutions rather than with anything a customer sees.