Why Wall Street giants build tokenization money for institutions, not regular consumers
JPMorgan and Citi move billions in tokenized deposits, but only among their branches. A U.K. challenger bank is about to do something neither has done.
JPMorgan moves more than $3 trillion through its Kinexys blockchain platform, and Citi Token Services processes billions in cross-border payments daily. Both are great examples of Wall Street giants modernizing their legacy systems and adopting blockchain for cross-border payments; however, neither of them is for the regular person with a savings account.
That gap is not an accident. "Most of the coins that have been minted and are being used for money transfer are all internal projects," said Mintoo Bhandari, founder of Monument Bank, a U.K. challenger bank with a roughly $2.4 billion balance sheet.
That is the central divide in the tokenized-money debate. Banks are putting tokenized deposits and payments on blockchain infrastructure, but most projects remain restricted to institutional customers or permissioned networks. Monument and privacy-focused blockchain Midnight are betting that regulated, interest-bearing bank deposits can eventually give retail clients access to tokenized investments and lending without requiring them to understand crypto.
"Once you create a private blockchain, how do you then speak to another private blockchain? You then have to use a bridge or some other mechanism, and at that point, you have data leakage." JPMorgan and Citibank have recognized this themselves, Syed said.