Finance News

Story: Dallas Fed Warns Tokenized Deposits Could Lead to $700 Billion Credit Crisis

By Bruce Buterin

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Banks Are Already Building the Rails. Here's the awkward part: even as the Dallas Fed flags the risks, banks are sprinting to build the…

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How Banks Might Respond — And What It Costs. Levy and Ramaswamy think banks have a few options, none of them free.

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The Dallas Fed just dropped a warning that the banking industry probably didn't want to hear.

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Rosie Levy and Srini Ramaswamy, both economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, put out an analysis saying that programmable deposits — the kind that move instantly,…

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Their numbers are pretty striking. A 10% rise in deposit sensitivity to interest rates could cut banks' capacity to hold long-term loans and other assets by roughly $700 billion.

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Here's the awkward part: even as the Dallas Fed flags the risks, banks are sprinting to build the very infrastructure that makes tokenized deposits possible. Thirty-nine U.S.

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The Clearing House is also building a separate network, backed by major players including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America.

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And the cross-border piece is moving fast too. On August 20, Standard Chartered and HSBC completed a live cross-border transaction using Swift's blockchain ledger.

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Read also: Hugging Face Seeks $13 Billion Sale After Turning Down Nvidias $7 Billion Offer

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Levy and Ramaswamy think banks have a few options, none of them free. One path: hold more highly liquid assets — reserves, U.S.

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So the scenario is basically this: faster, smarter deposits could make banking more efficient at the transaction layer while quietly making credit more expensive at the lending…

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The economists also point to Brazil's Pix instant-payment system as a rough comparison — though they're careful to separate it from tokenized deposits, which are a different…

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Agentic artificial intelligence adds another layer. Levy and Ramaswamy specifically call out AI-driven systems as a factor that could accelerate deposit mobility even further.

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More context: Hugging Face Considers $13 Billion Sale Amid AI Market Turmoil and Past Nvidia Offer

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Banks are aware of all this, which is partly why the BankChain Alliance exists. The logic seems to be: if tokenized deposits are coming regardless, better to build the rails…

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