The Clarity Act slipped to September. Banks are building anyway

The Senate pushed the Clarity Act into September. After months of negotiation, the market structure bill went into the August recess without a final vote, leaving the rules for digital asset markets unsettled for at least several more weeks.

Meanwhile, banks aren't waiting.

They are issuing tokenized deposits, testing onchain settlement, and working out how to move commercial bank money on new, compliant rails. The question has moved past whether banks will put deposits onchain. They already are.

The question now is whether the systems they are building can talk to one another. And that is the one question no bill in Congress can answer.

Banks are already building

JPMorgan has moved institutional payments through its Kinexys platform for years, reporting more than $3 trillion in cumulative transaction volume, and now offers JPMD, a deposit token for institutional clients. Citi runs Token Services for cross-border treasury across four markets. In June, seventeen major financial institutions, including JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi and Wells Fargo, announced that The Clearing House will clear and settle tokenized deposits onchain, with a reported target of 2027.

The same trend is emerging beyond the largest institutions. In March, Huntington, First Horizon, M&T Bank, KeyCorp and Old National became design partners on the Cari Network, a bank-governed tokenized-deposit network led by former Comptroller of the Currency Gene Ludwig. Over the last four months, more than 30 institutions have joined the network, with another 40 in active discussion, representing institutions with more than $10 trillion in combined assets. The network, powered by Prividium, a privacy-focused layer 2 built on ZKsync, is designed to let regulated banks issue, transfer, and redeem tokenized deposits while keeping those deposits on their balance sheets.

These are not science projects. They are attempts to solve a practical problem: moving money and collateral around the clock while preserving the regulatory protections that make commercial bank deposits useful in the first place.

But a network is not a system

Here is the part the industry keeps talking past. A tokenized deposit is a claim on one specific bank. A JPMorgan token dollar and a regional bank's token dollar are different liabilities on different balance sheets, and no technology makes them the same asset.

That means interoperability between deposit networks was never going to come from a messaging standard or a token bridge. It comes the way it has always come in banking: through clearing. When money moves between banks, the sending bank's token is redeemed, the receiving bank issues its own, the obligation between the two institutions is recorded and netted against everything else flowing between them, and the residual settles in central bank money. That machinery, not the token, is what makes one bank's dollar spend like another's. It was true when clearing houses formed in the 19th century, and it is true onchain.

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.