Thirty-nine state banking trade groups have formed the BankChain Alliance, a coalition that plans to build a shared blockchain network owned and governed by banks for community and regional institutions across the United States.

Announced Tuesday in a press release, the proposed network is designed to support tokenized deposits, stablecoins, programmable payments, and automated settlement for thousands of U.S. financial institutions. It is targeting a 2027 launch, but the alliance has yet to name a technology provider, select an underlying blockchain, settle on a governance model, or disclose which banks will participate.

The alliance said the shared network would help banks of all sizes adopt blockchain-based services while maintaining existing regulatory standards. For community and regional banks, which typically lack the technology budgets of the largest institutions, the shared-network model is positioned as a way to add those capabilities without building blockchain infrastructure on their own.

The plan also lands in a shifting policy landscape. Existing stablecoins, dominated by nonbank-issued tokens such as Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC, carry a combined market value in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and the GENIUS Act, the federal stablecoin law signed in July 2025, allows banks to issue payment stablecoins alongside qualified nonbank issuers. Tokenized deposits, by contrast, are digital representations of ordinary bank deposits and remain on bank balance sheets.

“Through an unprecedented collaboration representing thousands of banks, BankChain Alliance is developing a secure, regulated, industry-built and industry-owned network that allows institutions of all sizes to provide modern capabilities so they can continue serving customers safely and efficiently in rural, urban and regional communities across the country,” said Kathy Kraninger, Interim Chair of the BankChain Alliance and President and CEO of the Florida Bankers Association, in a statement. Kraninger previously served as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from 2018 to 2021.

The participating associations span the country, including groups from Texas, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, Washington, and Oregon. The coalition also includes organizations from smaller markets such as Maine, Vermont, Hawaii, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Ohio is represented by the Ohio Bankers League, while every other participant is organized as a state bankers association.

While the alliance says banks will be able to own the network, it has not provided specifics on interoperability, whether it will be built on a specific blockchain such as XRP, Ethereum, or Solana, or how tokenized deposits and stablecoins would be issued and settled. According to a BankChain Alliance spokesperson, the group is still selecting a technology partner and has not finalized the network’s architecture. The network is intended to be interoperable with other networks, though further technical details are not yet available. The spokesperson added that the alliance modeled its governance structure after the Federal Home Loan Bank system, with participating banks directing and governing the network. That system, created by Congress in 1932, consists of 11 regional wholesale banks owned cooperatively by their member financial institutions.

The effort follows years of testing by banks and payment providers of blockchain-based deposits and around-the-clock settlement. In October, Custodia Bank and Vantage Bank Texas introduced an interoperable tokenized-deposit platform for U.S. banks. The following month, JPMorgan launched its JPMD deposit token on Base for institutional clients, with plans to expand it to other networks and currencies. In January, BNY announced a private, permissioned platform for tokenized deposits, initially for collateral and margin transactions. In July, Swift said 17 global banks would test tokenized-deposit transfers outside traditional banking hours. For the thousands of institutions the 39 associations represent, the alliance amounts to a collective attempt to match capabilities that the largest banks have already begun rolling out on their own.