The largest banks in the United States are working on a tokenized deposit network that is intended to launch in the first half of next year through their co-owned payment network company Clearing House, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Specific banks involved in the project include JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America. The move is seen as a response from the banking industry over the growth in stablecoins in recent years, which are the specific kind of dollar-pegged crypto token that has been at the center of a feud between the crypto and banking industries regarding specific language that will be included in the crypto regulatory bill making its way through the Senate, known as the Clarity Act. The technical specifics of the tokenized deposit network remain unclear at this time. However, unlike stablecoins, which are issued by private companies, these tokenized deposits would be issued directly by banks as digital versions of customer deposits, meaning they would generally remain within the traditional banking regulatory framework and retain the associated consumer protections. “Tokenization” is one of the latest buzzwords related to crypto and blockchain technology to be tossed around quite a bit, so it’s not exactly clear if these deposits will be operating on open networks or more permissioned systems, the latter of which tend to be more commonly seen when these sorts of large financial institutions are involved. This is indeed the case with the New York Stock Exchange’s upcoming tokenization platform. JPMorgan already operates its own private blockchain-based payments infrastructure through Kinexys, but the bank has also begun experimenting with public blockchain networks, launching a deposit token called JPM Coin on Coinbase’s Base blockchain.