For banks
Keep the deposit. Add the capability.
Your clients want programmable, settlement-final money. Today they get it by leaving you.
What changes for a bank
What stays the same
Your core banking system. Your KYC and AML procedures. Deposit insurance and the resolution regime. Capital and liquidity treatment. Your supervisor. Your customer contracts.
What changes
A new settlement account type in the core. A small gateway inside your perimeter. Two signing keys in your own hardware. A settlement balance at the central bank. 24/7 finality for tokenized balances. A seat on the Member Council.
What you never take on
A pool of money or a custodian. A stablecoin license. Monthly attestations. A data feed, a bridge or a substitute token. Blockchain skills on your operations desk. Exposure to Fiat-on-Chain — we never hold money.
Ninety days
Contract to first token.
Two people on your side for thirteen weeks. Everything else is our cost.
Weeks 1–2
Scope and design
Token-account design, connector for your core, rulebook review, key-ceremony plan, sandbox roles agreed with the supervisor.
Weeks 3–6
Connect and sign
Certified connector deployed; keys generated in your hardware; the gateway reads live messages in shadow mode; the proof service validated against your ledger.
Weeks 7–10
Prove in sandbox
Proof published every minute; regulator’s screen live; circuit-breaker and rollback tests; bank-failure playbook rehearsed on paper with your resolution team.
Weeks 11–13
Go live, bounded
First client segment tokenized with holding limits; 60-day zero-break window; limits lifted by rule as the proof record accumulates.
What it is worth
Deposits retained. New fee lines. Cost removed.
- Deposits retained — balances your clients would have moved into a stablecoin stay on your book, lendable, funding you at your cost.
- New revenue — programmable-payment and instant-settlement fees; cross-border at the same instant; settlement services to the exchanges you bank; cash-leg fees on tokenized issuance.
- Cost removed — batch reconciliation, correspondent charges, cut-off handling, and the compliance cost of any stablecoin you were considering.
- Position — the first bank in your market shapes the rulebook from a Member Council seat, fixes its fee tier, and positions the bank as an early settlement institution for tokenized-asset flows in its market.
What it costs
Gateway license USD 150–400K a year, tiered by tokenized balance. Proof service USD 5–15K a month. Certification USD 25–75K, then 15K a year. Regulatory reporting USD 20–50K a year. Connector deployment USD 30–100K once. Settlement fees of 2–10 bps only on payments to other institutions, under a published formula with a cap.
Indicative year one for a bank tokenizing GEL 200M: USD 450–700K, plus settlement fees on actual inter-bank volume. Founding-member terms fix the license at the bottom of the tier for three years.
Indicative; your figures in the joint business case.
Your board will ask
Six questions, six answers.
CRO: “You are putting deposits on a blockchain.”
No. The deposit stays on your ledger. The token is your entry made portable, proven equal to your balance every minute, with a breaker that halts creation the moment that equality fails. Reconciliation and unauthorized-mint exposure are reduced in these specific dimensions: reconciliation becomes an invariant checked every cycle, and a single compromised system can no longer post money.
CFO: “Where is the return?”
Deposits stay lendable instead of leaving for a stablecoin. New fee lines on programmable, cross-border and securities flows. The cost is a license and a connector; the alternative is losing the deposit.
CIO: “This is a two-year integration.”
Ninety days. The gateway reads the ISO 20022 messages your core already emits, through a certified connector. Two people for thirteen weeks on your side.
Compliance: “Which regime does this fall under?”
Yours. The token is your deposit; nothing new is created. Your supervisor gets a read-only screen with real-time visibility. Counsel opinion before go-live.
Board: “What if Fiat-on-Chain disappears?”
The specification is open, the source is in escrow, your keys are in your own hardware, and the Member Council can appoint a successor operator under the step-in clause.
Treasury: “Why not just issue a stablecoin?”
Because it moves the deposit off your balance sheet, adds a second rulebook, a reserve and a monthly audit, and hands the yield to a custodian. This keeps the deposit and adds the capability.
Three decisions and thirty days.
Scope, connector and sandbox roles. A working session with your treasury, CIO and compliance leads in the first week; a joint business case in your figures by day fifteen; contract on founding-member terms by day thirty.