BNY Mellon Launches Tokenized Deposits on Permissioned Blockchain, Tapping Citadel, ICE and Ripple Prime

Old-Line Banking Meets Always-On Markets as BNY Mellon Pushes Cash On-Chain

TL;DR

• BNY Mellon has gone live with tokenized bank deposits on a permissioned blockchain, targeting 24/7 settlement, collateral, and margin use cases.
• Early participants include Citadel Securities, Intercontinental Exchange, Ripple Prime, Circle, DRW, and Baillie Gifford.
• The move reflects a broader institutional shift toward always-on market infrastructure as regulators signal openness to continuous trading.

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BNY Mellon has formally launched a tokenized deposit product that moves traditional bank deposits onto blockchain rails, marking one of the most concrete deployments yet by a global systemically important bank. The initiative places real depositor claims issued by BNY Mellon onto a permissioned distributed ledger, allowing institutional clients to use on-chain representations of cash for payments, collateral movements, and margin requirements. With $57.8 trillion in assets under custody, the bank’s decision signals that blockchain infrastructure is no longer confined to pilot programs but is increasingly being treated as core financial plumbing.

The tokenized deposits are issued on BNY Mellon’s own permissioned blockchain, where participation is restricted to approved institutional entities rather than the public. This design keeps the assets squarely within the regulated banking system, distinguishing them from stablecoins that circulate on open networks and rely on reserve backing. According to the bank, the deposits can accrue interest and function as direct claims against BNY Mellon’s balance sheet, while enabling programmable transactions that can execute automatically when predefined conditions are met.

Early adopters of the platform include Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange; Citadel Securities, one of the world’s largest market makers; proprietary trading firm DRW; asset manager Baillie Gifford; Circle; and Ripple Prime, Ripple’s institutional liquidity arm. Their participation underscores the focus on capital-markets use cases, particularly the need for faster settlement and more efficient collateral management in trading and clearing operations that increasingly run across time zones and outside traditional market hours.

BNY Mellon has framed the launch as a response to institutional demand for infrastructure that supports continuous operation rather than end-of-day batch processing. Carolyn Weinberg, the bank’s chief product and innovation officer, described the effort as a way to connect trusted banking institutions with emerging digital rails in a format that large financial firms are comfortable adopting. The emphasis on trust and control reflects why the bank opted for a permissioned system, prioritizing governance and compliance over open access.

The rollout arrives as regulators signal a willingness to rethink the structure of financial markets. Recent proposals and public statements from U.S. regulators have pointed toward the possibility of 24/7 trading and settlement, a shift that would require banks and market operators to modernize their infrastructure. Tokenized deposits are increasingly viewed as a key building block for that transition, allowing cash to move with the same speed and programmability as tokenized securities.

BNY Mellon’s move fits into a wider industry pattern. JPMorgan has expanded use of its JPM Coin for institutional settlement, HSBC has announced plans to extend tokenized deposit services to the United States and the United Arab Emirates, and Barclays has backed infrastructure startups focused on clearing tokenized bank money. Market-infrastructure providers such as Swift have also been developing blockchain-based settlement layers, suggesting that the race is underway to re-engineer how money moves behind the scenes.

Rather than positioning tokenized deposits as a replacement for existing payment systems, BNY Mellon is presenting them as an institutional upgrade, designed to reduce friction, improve transparency, and unlock liquidity trapped by slow settlement cycles. With major trading firms and exchanges already onboard, the launch highlights how traditional finance is incrementally absorbing blockchain technology, not as a speculative asset class, but as a tool to rebuild the mechanics of global markets.

This article has been refined and enhanced by ChatGPT.