Banks are focusing on pulling stablecoins and tokenized forms of more traditional financial instruments into one integrated package to meet growing institutional demand for multi-asset flexibility.
Rather than waiting for a single winner to emerge, large asset managers and corporate treasuries are demanding a multi-instrument setup in which stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits and tokenized money market funds all run on the same infrastructure.
“The demand from institutional clients is consistent: they are not waiting for any single instrument to prevail,” Thomas Eichenberger, chief strategy officer and deputy group CEO at Swiss-based digital asset bank Sygnum, told CoinDesk on Thursday in an email.
“They are asking how tokenized deposits, regulated stablecoins, and tokenized money market funds can be combined and made interoperable, so a treasury function can move between them — permissioned settlement, 24/7 cross-border flows, yield with on-demand liquidity — under one regulatory framework they already trust,” he added.
Sygnum, which describes itself as the world’s first digital assets bank, partnered late last year with Swiss banking powerhouse UBS and PostFinance, a subsidiary company of the state-owned Swiss Post, to test blockchain payments between institutions on Ethereum.
Also in the race to issue a stablecoin is Qivalis, a consortium of 37 of the European Union’s largest banks , which aims to launch a digital euro before the end of this year.
The big push from banks directly challenges what European politicians have been saying about who should control the future of digital money. On one hand, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde recently argued that euro stablecoins will not fix the deeper issues in Europe's financial markets, which mostly just need more available cash and a truly safe, trusted asset.
While Sygnum’s multi-instrument approach actually supports Lagarde’s thesis that stablecoins are not a silver bullet, it does challenge her conclusion on how to fix the issue. Rather than wait for central banks to issue a digital euro, commercial institutions are developing the solutions themselves.
Eichenberger agreed that stablecoins alone cannot bridge that gap. He said that stablecoins pegged to the euro have always struggled to catch on because they are hard to access, lack actual bank backing and do not connect well with the rest of the financial world.
By blending Beyond the assets themselves, a separate technical debate is playing out over the infrastructure handling these transactions.
“Most institutional discussions still default to private chains for data privacy and counterparty control,” Eichenberger said. “The practical view from operators, though, is that public-yet-permissioned models — public infrastructure with regulated access control — are where the convergence is heading. That is what allows connectivity to the broader on-chain financial system without compromising supervision.”
That blend of open access and strict tracking is already happening in real life. This year, Sygnum teamed up with UBS, PostFinance, Raiffeisen, Zürcher Kantonalbank, BCV and Swiss Stablecoin to launch a joint Swiss franc-backed (CHF) stablecoin testing program.
For everyone else in the industry, the Swiss trial serves as a live example of what bank-run token networks look like when the companies making them, the cash backing them and the watchdogs checking them all live inside the same country.
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