Enterprise Tokenized Settlement: Can Convertibility Hold Under Stress At Scale?

Tokenized money is going plural — stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits are both moving toward live enterprise use in 2026, but they hold their value at par through different mechanisms, and each faces a different test under stress. Stablecoins hold par through reserves and redemption, now being formalized by 2026 rulemaking, from the GENIUS Act to MiCA; under stress, the question is whether reserves and redemption queues hold up in a run. Tokenized deposits hold par through the existing two-tier banking system and a central bank's guarantee of convertibility, but scale through interbank plumbing that's still being decided — settlement-bank arrangements or shared platforms. Under stress, the question there is whether that plumbing, and the counterparty exposure it creates, holds up if a bank or a platform fails.

As regulators and participants warned at the Point Zero Forum, the open question is whether convertibility at par survives a crisis in practice, on any of these rails. This session asks what needs to be built at each stage — reserve or capital backing, custody or bank participation, secondary-market trading, and cross-ledger settlement — for that convertibility to hold under stress. It puts reserve-backed and deposit-backed models on equal footing: where each is already resilient, where each is still exposed, and whether a fragmented rails landscape is itself becoming the bigger risk to singleness than any one model's design.