The traditional financial counterattack: the union chain is quietly rejuvenating
By Chloe, Challenger
in june 2026, a dozen of the largest banks in the united states joined forces to announce that they would build a shared network of token deposits by 2027, which would face the erosion of stable currencies on deposits. so far, the system has not been named the bridge, or the chain。
And behind that is a concept that has been in the market for many years and is now quietly turning over: the union chain。
The banks form the Avengers Alliance
On June 5, 2026, the Wall Street Journal first released a message: Morgan Chase, Citigroup, a group of American banks led by American banks to build a shared network of token deposits by the first half of 2027。
Later that day, the banks added a joint press release that spreaded the list from four to a dozen. The Bank of Rich Countries is the initiator, followed by BNY, BMO, HSBC, PNC, Doming (TD), U.S. Bank, Truist, Citizens, Fisher Third, Huntington, KeyBank, Regions, Santander。
Operators are The Clearing House, these banks' own joint venture payment companies. There's no official name for the system, according to the Wall Street Journal。
Over the past two years, the eyes of the currency ring have been mainly on the general public chain, the issuing currency and the drop-off line. But the real movement of institutional funds and technologies is going in another direction: the exclusive chain of end-use, agency-driven, not necessarily currency. It sounds familiar, because it's the spirit of the union chain of the year. It's only this time, it's probably real。
The bank's scared. The stabilizer took the deposit
If you understand the counterattack, you need to know what traditional finance is against: stable currency. According to DeFiLlama, in June 2026 the total market value of the global stable currency was about $31.6 billion. The USDTs accounted for about 62 per cent of the total, with a market value of about $186.0 billion, USDCs about $75 billion, and the two combined ate about 80 per cent of the entire market。
According to Bitrue, the stabilization currency handled approximately $46 trillion in transactions throughout 2025, more than 20 times PayPal, approaching three times Visa. By the first quarter of 2026, the stabilization currency accounted for about 75 per cent of the total volume of encrypted transactions, and the stabilization track had long been a global payment and settlement pipeline that jumped every day。
For the traditional bankers, this pipeline has stepped on their lives: deposits. How much credit the bank can lend and how much it has in its hands. Once customers are used to moving money from bank accounts into secure wallets, the basis on which the bank can lend is empty. Mark Monaco, the global payment manager of the Bank of America, said that the system was in advance of the day when demand really came up。
And what really forces banks to act positively is deregulation. GENIUS Act in the United States has been legislated to land, requiring: 1:1 full reserve, periodic audit, and implementing rules are scheduled to enter into force on 18 July 2026. The effect of the bill is not to frame the stable currency, but to take its rightful place. When the stabilization currency is transformed from a grey zone into a licensed, audited and bankable legal instrument, its substitution for traditional deposits is no longer hypothetical。
The banks did not suddenly fall in love with the block chains, but someone had laid the tracks at the door, forcing them to lay themselves。
Bridge or Chain? What exactly is this network
Back to the unnamed chain. Its technical name is Regulatory Settlement Network, RSN. The practice is to convert bank deposits into tokens on block chains so that they can be settled in real time, 24 hours a year, without having to wait another working day。
“Designate deposits” are not a new digital asset, but the same deposit is exchanged for accounting. It carries the same credit risk, applies the same supervision, and remains in the banking system protected by deposit insurance. This is the fundamental difference between it and the stable currency: the stable currency moves money out of the banking system, and the tokenized deposits keep money in the system, but the speed and programmability of almost encrypted money has grown。
The Clearing House CEO, David Watson, mentioned that this was a big move for banks, describing the chain payments as moving towards a completely different future; and that Morgan Chase’s Global Payments Co-Director, Max Neukirchen, was more pragmatic in saying that for payments to remain ecologically stable and resilient, a regulated market infrastructure would be needed to clear these monetized deposits。
By the time the news came out, the network had yet to determine which block chain to use. Technology is unpaved and names are swaying between bridges and chains, but more than a dozen of the largest banks in the United States are willing to put their names together in the same press release. At this stage, it is governance that is negotiated more than technology: who operates, who comes in and who rules. The answer to these three questions is exactly what the word union chain was all about。
Last failure of the Alliance Chain
From 2016 to 2022, it was the first wave of enterprise block chains. Morgan Chase experimented at the Ether House in 2016 and then developed its own private chain, Quorum; IBM and Linux Foundation, Hyperledger Fabric, R3-led Corda, and then almost collective dumb。
The reason is not complicated. There were two things about the union chain: there was no pressure to cooperate; each bank built a closed chain, which was not connected to each other, and turned into an island; and, in many cases, a licensed book, which, as a matter of fact, was a password-based database, where technology was available to look back. By 2020, when the entire narrative of the market goes down to the public chain, the DeFi and the mobile mining, the union chain is labeled "on the chain, but not on the right place" and slowly exits the subject center。
Rewinding the past, it drew a line for today. The alliance chain wasn't lost in technology, it was lost in no one really needed it. And in 2026 it was seen again, just as it was the missing piece: real, urgent, and the need for regulatory endorsements; it was a hard-looking scene, and this time it was going back。
Data: The institutional-level alliance chain is working quietly
The monetized deposit network is not an isolated event. Over the past 18 months, several agency-led dedicated chains have accumulated quantifiable scale of use, the most complete of which is Canton Network。
Canton, developed by Digital Asset, is a chain of publicly licensed blocks designed to prepare smart contracts for Daml, designed to allow competing financial institutions to share the same set of settlements infrastructure, subject to privacy, including Visa, Nasdaq and BNP Paribas。
By the end of 2025, over 700 institutions had access to Canton. The largest online application of the Broadridge distributed book-backing platform (DLR), which handles dollarized United States Treasury debt buy-backs of about $4 trillion a month, equivalent to about $280 billion a day, doubled from $2 trillion a month in 2025。
In December 2025, DTCC, the United States securities central repository, announced that it would work with Digital Asset to monetize its United States Treasury debt in Canton, which was expected to expand in the second half of 2026. DTCC is the core agency for the settlement of United States shares and fixed proceeds, and its participation means that the institutional chain has been extended to the bottom infrastructure of the United States market。
Data at the single bank level are equally specific. Morgan Chase's block chain sector Kinexys has been paid for by JPM Coin in private chain processing agencies since 2020 and currently handles over $5 billion a day. Citigroup Token Services is online to support real-time cross-border transfers between New York, London and Hong Kong. BNY also launched agency-oriented token deposit services in January 2026。
Combining these data, the monetized deposit network is positioned as an interoperability layer connecting existing projects in banks rather than a completely new chain. The promoter is not a technology supplier, but a bank that has accumulated a real volume of transactions, returning to a common set of standards that can be linked to each other。
The line between the public chain and the union chain is being erased by our own people. Drop it
Looking at Morgan Chase's layout, it's plowing the private chain Kinexys while moving JPM Coin deposits to Coinbase Base in June 2025. Within a short period of time, in January 2026, it deployed JPMD to Canton as the second chain to carry this institutional digital cash after Base。
The same bank, private chain, open licence chain, public chain, all three sides of the chain。
Earlier, Singapore Star Fair Bank and Kinexys also agreed in November 2025 to work together to develop an interoperability framework that would allow for the transfer of tokenized deposits between ecosystems along their chains. What the industry really cares about is that it is not a question of a “coalition chain or a public chain” as a matter of choice, but of how a “licensing issue” can match a “cross-chain settlement”。
For banks, the public chain is a conduit for access to funds and users, and the union chain is the bottom of a settlement that meets privacy and compliance, which are not rivals at all and are the first two parts of the same chain. The Alliance Chain Renaissance came back not from the closed, unconnected old union chain of 2018, but from its governance soul: the use of death, institutional dominance, rules first. The difference is, this time, this soul has been replaced with a new body that matches the public chain。
Conclusion: the real contest is the name of the infrastructure. Down
The main script of the past few years was “Decentreization will eventually replace traditional finance”. But what's happening in 2026 is another version: traditional finance has not been replaced; it's just a technology that takes block chains out of the public chain, the coin, the DeFi set, back to its familiar track: a regulatory, licensed, institutional logic。
The difference between this logic and the chain of alliances of the year is that this time it was based on the real demand for a stabilized currency, the regulatory runways laid by GENIUS Act, and the actual volume of trade that Canton and Kinexys ran out of, not just a technical proposition, but a set of facts that are already in operation。
Winning in the public or the union chain is never the point. There was no clear functional distinction between modern currency deposits and stable currencies, and the end point of competition was no longer a product, but whose infrastructure was first considered a default option. The financial infrastructure for the next decade, in whose name it is, is the real bet on this table。
