The world’s central bank for central banks used its highest-profile stage of the year to take a side in the stablecoin debate. Speaking at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium on August 28, Bank for International Settlements General Manager Pablo Hernandez de Cos argued that tokenized deposits, not stablecoins, are the technology best suited to carry the bulk of everyday payments and wholesale settlement going forward.
His case rests on a property he called “singleness,” the ability of any unit of money to be redeemed at par into central bank money. Tokenized deposits keep that property because they remain bank liabilities settled through central bank accounts inside the existing two-tier banking system. Stablecoins, he argued, do not have an equivalent mechanism: converting between different stablecoin issuers can require selling one in a secondary market to buy another, with no guarantee the trade happens at par. He also flagged that most stablecoin balances sit in self-custodied wallets, which complicates anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing compliance in a way bank deposits do not. “Money is more than a technology,” he said. “It is an institutional achievement.”
The speech arrives as banks are already building what de Cos is endorsing rather than waiting for the theoretical case to be settled. This publication has tracked stablecoin infrastructure consolidating into unified platforms at the same time consumer stablecoin spending has been tripling, a growth curve running in the opposite direction from what the BIS is now recommending. De Cos was careful not to call for banning stablecoins outright, saying they should serve “more specialized roles” rather than disappear, but his intervention gives central banks and prudential regulators a clear intellectual anchor for steering commercial adoption toward bank-issued tokenized deposits as the default rail, with stablecoins pushed toward the margins of the payment system rather than its center.
