Tokenized deposits vs stablecoins vs CBDC compared: issuers, legal claims, yield, real deployments and where each wins, from JPMD to the digital euro.
Three instruments are competing to become money on blockchain rails: tokenized bank deposits, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies. The direct answer to the title question is that nobody wins outright, because the three are not substitutes. A stablecoin is a claim on a private issuer's reserve, a tokenized deposit is a claim on a bank, a CBDC is a claim on the central bank itself. Different balance sheets, different regulation, different jobs. What changed in the last eighteen months is that all three moved from slideware to production or near-production. JPMorgan's JPMD deposit token settles institutional payments on a public blockchain. Stablecoins hover around 300 billion dollars and now have full legal regimes in both the EU and the US. The digital euro has a pilot date. The BIS tested a unified ledger with seven central banks. The comparison is no longer theoretical, so it deserves precise definitions and…