Tokenised Deposits After Jackson Hole: The Intelligence Problem Nobody Has Solved Yet
Speaking at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium on 28 August 2026, Pablo Hernández de Cos, General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements, set out the clearest statement to date of where the central banking community stands on stablecoins and tokenised deposits. His verdict on stablecoins was measured but unambiguous: in their current form, they “do not yet uphold the foundational properties of money.” His preferred path forward is tokenised deposits, settled in central bank money and embedded in the existing two-tier monetary system.
The speech deserves close reading by anyone working in blockchain intelligence, because the model it favours will reshape what on-chain data looks like, who holds it, and who is able to see it.
What the BIS said
Hernández de Cos identified three structural weaknesses in stablecoins as they exist today. The first is singleness: a holder of one stablecoin who needs to pay a counterparty that accepts only another must go through a secondary market, where prices deviate from par. The second is interoperability: stablecoins circulate across fragmented blockchains, and even the same coin on different chains cannot move between them without costly or risky workarounds. The third is integrity: most stablecoin balances now sit in self-custodied wallets, and their use in illicit activity has grown, which places real strain on AML/CFT frameworks.
He also warned of macro-financial consequences if adoption spreads. Stablecoin reserves concentrated in wholesale bank deposits would replace stable retail funding with rate-sensitive wholesale liabilities, raising the cost of credit and hitting smaller banks hardest. In stress, fire sales of government bills or sudden withdrawals of issuer deposits could spill into core money markets. And where foreign-currency stablecoins gain traction, “digital dollarisation” can erode monetary sovereignty and weaken policy transmission.
Tokenised deposits, in his view, avoid these problems. They keep funds within the regulated banking perimeter, settle at par in central bank money and operate under prudential supervision. He acknowledged that no multi-bank, cross-jurisdictional ecosystem for them yet exists, pointing to Project Agorá as an early demonstration for wholesale cross-border payments. His call to policymakers was for internationally consistent stablecoin requirements on reserves, liquidity, governance and redemption, alongside central bank access to tokenised reserves on programmable platforms, common technical standards and cross-border supervisory cooperation.
The intelligence challenge the speech leaves open
The BIS case for tokenised deposits rests on the integrity of the two-tier system: banks know their customers, supervisors oversee banks, and the central bank anchors settlement. That architecture is sound as a matter of monetary design. It is far less settled as a matter of data.
Public blockchains, whatever their flaws, produce a single shared record. Every transaction is visible to every analyst, investigator and supervisor on equal terms, and an entire discipline has grown up around reading that record. Tokenised deposits will not work that way. Each bank will run, or participate in, its own permissioned ledger. Central banks will operate a separate layer for tokenised reserves. Platform operators, custodians, technology vendors and cross-border bridges will each hold a fragment. Supervisors, financial intelligence units and law enforcement will sit outside all of them, dependent on access rights, reporting obligations and requests for information.
The result is a transaction trail that is no longer one dataset but many, held by different institutions under different legal regimes, with no shared identifier scheme and no common format. A payment that crosses two banks, a central bank settlement layer and a jurisdictional border may leave four partial records that no single party can reconstruct end to end. This is the fragmentation problem, and it is not solved by better cryptography or by regulation of reserves. It is a question of data architecture.
Three specific difficulties follow. Attribution becomes institutional rather than analytical: instead of clustering addresses on an open ledger, an investigator must obtain and reconcile records from each participant, with all the delay that implies. Interoperability with the public-chain world becomes a blind spot: tokenised deposits will inevitably be exchanged against stablecoins and other crypto-assets at some boundary, and that boundary is precisely where illicit flows will seek to cross, yet it is the point at which visibility is weakest because the two data models do not match. And supervision becomes dependent on bespoke arrangements: without agreed standards for how ledger data is described, retained and shared, every supervisor will negotiate its own access with every platform, and cross-border cooperation will run at the speed of the slowest memorandum of understanding.
What needs to happen
The BIS is right that tokenisation should be anchored in central bank money and that stablecoins need internationally consistent rules. But the intelligence dimension deserves the same attention as the monetary one, and it is currently missing from the agenda.
Common technical standards for tokenised deposits should include common data standards: a shared vocabulary for transactions, participants and settlement events that allows records from different ledgers to be joined without manual reconciliation. Supervisory access should be designed into platforms from the outset, not layered on afterwards, so that competent authorities can observe flows across the ecosystem rather than one bank at a time. The boundary between permissioned and public systems should be treated as a monitored perimeter, with obligations on whoever operates the exchange point to preserve the linkage between the two records. And the professionals who will be asked to interpret this data, in banks, central banks, FIUs and law enforcement, need a shared method and shared training so that a finding produced in one institution is legible in another.
None of this is beyond reach. The Open Blockchain Intelligence Standards (OBIS), an open, vendor-neutral initiative promoted by the Blockchain Intelligence Professionals Association together with ICI Bucharest and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, exists precisely to give banks, central banks, supervisors and investigators a common way of describing, exchanging and interpreting ledger data, so that evidence assembled from fragmented records can be trusted across institutions and borders. Getting there requires the public and private sector to treat blockchain intelligence as infrastructure, on a par with settlement and liquidity, rather than as a service purchased after the fact. The open questions of the Jackson Hole speech are ultimately questions of who can see what. If tokenised deposits are to deliver the integrity the BIS expects of them, that has to be answered before the ledgers go live, not after.
Source: Pablo Hernández de Cos, “Pushing the monetary frontier: stablecoins and tokenised deposits,” remarks at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, 28 August 2026 — bis.org