Wells Fargo joins big US banks building a tokenized deposit network for 2027

Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) has joined the league of large U.S. banks building a shared tokenized deposit network, operated by The Clearing House. 

The project is targeting a first-half of 2027 launch and would allow the banks to move digital versions of customer deposits between each other around the clock.

What are major U.S. banks launching?

JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM), the Bank of America (NYSE:BAC), Wells Fargo, Citigroup (NYSE: C) and other large U.S. banks are building a shared tokenized deposit network scheduled for launch in the first half of 2027. 

The Clearing House, a private payments firm the participating banks own collectively, would run the new system.

Through this new system, deposits recorded on blockchain rails would settle instantly and at any hour, pushing bank transfers past the standard business-day window they run on today. However, no blockchain partner has been chosen yet.

The first users of the system are expected to be large multinational companies, the kind with tangled cross-border payment and treasury needs that stand to gain from round-the-clock liquidity.

Wells Fargo, which oversees $1.7 trillion in assets, piloted an internal settlement tool called Wells Fargo Digital Cash on its own distributed-ledger platform back in 2019.

In May 2025, Wells Fargo, alongside others like Citigroup, JPMorgan and Bank of America, reportedly held early discussions about a jointly issued stablecoin.

Cryptopolitan reported that stablecoins topped $300 billion in market value by the end of that year, with transaction volume reaching $55 trillion.

The pending U.S. stablecoin legislation, known as the CLARITY Act, has banks on alert over provisions within it that could let stablecoin issuers pay interest and compete head-on with deposit rates.

On the other hand, a bank-run network offers blockchain speed and programmability without losing customers to crypto-native rivals.

Do clients actually want this system?

The adoption of the new system is still an open question. Mark Monaco, the Bank of America’s head of global payments solutions, said that clients are not “beating down the door” for tokenized deposits yet, but the network will ready banks for the demand when it arrives.

JPMorgan is bringing experience to the project with its Kinexys platform that already handles institutional payments. The bank launched a deposit token on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, earlier this year for its institutional clients.

Cryptopolitan reported this March that Wells Fargo filed a U.S. trademark application for WFUSD, a digital-asset platform covering payment processing, trading, and tokenization. The filing suggests that the bank could be developing a branded deposit token or stablecoin of its own.

The Clearing House effort would stretch the infrastructure of the participating banks across the wider banking system rather than keeping it inside one firm.

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