The United States banking industry is accelerating the advance of the payment and settlement infrastructure on the chain. Bank Chain Alliance, a group of 39 state banking associations, announced plans to establish a network of bank-owned and managed block chains that would provide monetized deposits, stable coins, programmable payments and automatic settlement services to thousands of financial institutions throughout the United States, with a target date of 2027.

This alliance is still in its early stages. The disclosed information indicates that the Alliance has not published technology service providers, bottom-chain selection, governance models, lists of participating banks, nor how the network interacts with existing systems, or how tokenized deposits and stable coins will be issued and liquidated.

Coverage points to the United States banking system.

Its members are from several states in the United States, including major markets such as Texas, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, Washington and Oregon, and smaller markets such as Maine, Vermont, Hawaii, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.

According to the Alliance, the network will be built and owned by the banking sector, with the objective of enabling banks of different sizes to provide financial services that are closer to real-time, programmable and maintain control over customer relations and capacity to pay.

Focus on monetized deposits and settlement efficiency

In the direction of disclosure, Bank Chain Alliance ' s core uses are concentrated in four categories of operations:

  • Currencyized deposits
  • Stable currency-related payments
  • Programmable payment process
  • Automation of liquidation and settlement

This means that the banking sector wants to move some of the traditional payment and transfer processes to the chain to support long-term and even round-the-clock financial flows and to reduce the number of manual elements in inter-agency settlements.

The banking industry has been testing the chain for almost two years.

This is not the first time that the United States banking system has tried a similar infrastructure. Banks and payment agencies have been testing block-chain-based certificates of deposit and off-the-book settlements over the past few years.

Public information indicates that Custodia Bank and Vantage Bank Texas launched an interoperability deposit platform for US banks last October. Subsequently, in November, Chase Morgan launched a deposit token for institutional clients on Base and indicated that it was planned to expand to more networks and currencies.

In January this year, the Melon Bank of New York announced a private, privately licensed, monetized deposit platform for initial use in collateral and bond transactions. By July, Swift also indicated that 17 global banks would test the transfer of tokenized deposits outside traditional banking hours.

In this context, the emergence of Bank Chain Alliance shows that the United States regional and state banking systems are also trying to establish their own chained financial networks, rather than relying entirely on large banks or single technology platforms.