The two tiers of money map onto two layers of payment infrastructure, and the architectural distinction is older than tokenisation and survives it. Wholesale flows between banks settle in central bank money on real-time gross settlement (RTGS) rails. Retail flows between customers move balances on commercial bank money rails. The tokenisation projects making real progress in 2026 are the ones that respect this separation and re-express each layer on programmable rails without trying to merge them into one.
Wholesale and retail flow separation
Every developed payments system is architected as two layers. The top layer settles between banks in central bank money, on an RTGS basis. The bottom layer moves balances between accounts at banks, in commercial bank money, with the wholesale layer providing eventual settlement of the net positions between banks.
The wholesale rails. Fedwire Funds in the United States for USD, settled in Federal Reserve reserves. CHAPS in the United Kingdom for GBP. T2 in the eurozone. MEPS+ in Singapore. CHATS in Hong Kong for HKD, USD, EUR, and CNY, designated under the Payment Systems and Stored Value Facilities Ordinance and operated by the HKMA together with HKICL. BOJ-NET in japan, settled in Bank of Japan reserves. Each runs on RTGS principles, processes high-value flows on a payment-by-payment basis, and gives finality at the moment of settlement on the central bank's books.
The retail rails. ACH in the United States, SEPA Credit Transfer and SEPA Instant in Europe, FAST and PayNow in Singapore, the Faster Payments Service in the United Kingdom, FPS in Hong Kong, Zengin in japan. These move commercial bank deposit balances between accounts at different banks, often in real time at the user-facing level, while the underlying settlement between the banks happens on the wholesale rail on a deferred net basis or, increasingly, in real time for instant-payment schemes.
The architectural point. A retail payment is a transfer of commercial bank money between accounts. The wholesale settlement that backs it is a transfer of central bank money between banks. The retail user sees one event. Two layers of money, two distinct legal transfers, are doing the work. Tokenisation projects that conflate the two layers tend to ship products that look elegant and fail to settle.
Why it matters now
The two-tier system is the conceptual frame underneath every serious tokenised cash project in 2026, and the BIS has been explicit about this in its policy work, particularly through the writings of Hyun Song Shin and the joint research with Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli on the unified ledger. The architecture being tested across Project Ensemble in Hong Kong, Project Guardian in Singapore, the Federal Reserve's Project Cedar work, and Project Agorá at the BIS Innovation Hub is a tiered ledger model where wholesale settlement runs in tokenised central bank money and the asset and deposit layers run in tokenised commercial bank money. The model maps directly onto the existing two-tier system. It does not replace the tiers. It re-expresses them on programmable rails.
The wholesale CBDC question is the question of whether central banks will tokenise reserves and put them on a ledger that can interoperate with tokenised deposits, tokenised securities, and tokenised collateral. Most APAC central banks have answered yes in pilot, with the HKMA, the Bank of Japan, and the MAS each running active wholesale CBDC work. The retail CBDC question is the separate question of whether the central bank will issue a tokenised liability accessible to non-bank holders, including individuals. The two questions have different answers in different jurisdictions, and the asymmetry is one of the most important policy features of the current cycle.
Cross-border experiments sit on top of this. Project mBridge is the multi-CBDC platform that graduated out of the BIS Innovation Hub perimeter. Project Mariana tested AMM-based FX for wholesale CBDC. Project Agorá brings tokenised commercial bank money into the same conversation as tokenised central bank money in a correspondent-banking-style architecture. Each of these is, structurally, a wholesale-tier project. None of them touch retail rails directly.
The Basel Committee under Pablo Hernández de Cos and now Ben Gully has set the prudential frame for bank exposures to crypto-assets through the basel sco60 cryptoasset standard. The standard treats tokenised traditional assets that meet the classification conditions as Group 1a, with capital treatment broadly similar to the underlying. Tokenised commercial bank money issued by the holding bank is, in most readings, a deposit that the bank already held, simply re-expressed in token form, and does not raise new capital questions on its own. Tokenised central bank money does not appear on commercial bank balance sheets as a Basel exposure in the conventional sense. The SCO60 standard is the lens through which prudential supervisors will look at how banks integrate either form into their tokenisation stacks.
How the wholesale layer changes when tokenised
A tokenised wholesale CBDC sits on an RTGS-equivalent ledger, but the rail is now programmable. That has two consequences operators care about. First, atomic delivery-versus-payment between a tokenised security and tokenised central bank money becomes possible on the same ledger, removing a class of settlement risk that the conventional system manages through committed lines, intraday liquidity, and DvP linkages between separate systems. Second, conditional payments, time-locked transfers, and policy-driven controls can be expressed at the ledger level rather than in messaging layers above it. Whether that is desirable is a policy question; whether it is technically possible is settled.
The retail layer is harder. A retail CBDC raises questions about disintermediation of bank deposits, monetary transmission, and privacy that have not been resolved in any major jurisdiction. APAC central banks are leaning into wholesale work and approaching retail with caution, partly for these reasons. Tokenised deposit infrastructure on the retail side is mostly being built by commercial banks under their existing licences, with the wholesale settlement layer continuing to run on the conventional rails or, in pilot environments, on a wholesale CBDC ledger.