This chapter sharpens the split that 03 bank money central bank money introduced. Wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC) and tokenised deposits both look like programmable money to a Web3 reader, both can settle a bond leg in milliseconds, and both can be made to interoperate with tokenised assets on the same ledger. They are not the same instrument, and the difference is not stylistic. It is a difference in issuer, in legal claim, in risk-weighted capital treatment, in who can hold the unit, and in how the instrument behaves under stress. A product team that misreads the choice ends up either over-engineering an interbank settlement flow that should have used central bank money, or under-protecting a client-facing flow that needed it. The chapter closes with the architectural pattern that has emerged in serious APAC pilots: not a contest, a tiered ledger where wCBDC sits underneath tokenised deposits and they cooperate. Project Ensemble in Hong Kong, the Bank of Thailand digital baht pilot, and Project Agorá are the live worked examples this chapter returns to.
Definition
Wholesale central bank digital currency, conventionally written wCBDC, is central bank money expressed as a transferable token on a programmable ledger, accessible to the same set of institutions that already hold reserve accounts at the central bank. The token is a direct liability of the central bank. Holding a unit gives the holder a claim on the central bank, ranking with reserves and physical cash as risk-free settlement asset in domestic currency. The defining trait is the issuer. Anything that is not a direct liability of the central bank is not wCBDC, regardless of how the ledger is structured.
A tokenised deposit is commercial bank money expressed as a transferable record on a ledger operated by, or licensed to, the issuing bank. The token represents the holder's deposit claim against that specific bank. Holding a unit of a Mizuho tokenised deposit gives the holder an unsecured claim on Mizuho. Holding a unit of a JPMorgan Kinexys tokenised deposit gives the holder a claim on JPMorgan. Two tokens denominated in the same currency on the same chain, issued by two different banks, are not fungible at law because the credit risk is different.
The instinct from the public-chain world is to fold both into a generic "stablecoin" or "tokenised cash" bucket and let the ledger do the work. That instinct is wrong in the same way it is wrong to treat a Treasury repo as fungible with a corporate repo because they both involve overnight financing. The shape rhymes. The credit story does not. The BIS working paper by Garratt and Shin on the singleness of money makes this point at length, and is the cleanest articulation of why tokenisation does not erase the issuer split (Garratt and Shin, 2023).
The issuer test
The working test is one question. Whose balance sheet is on the hook for the unit. If the answer is the central bank, you are looking at wCBDC. If the answer is a commercial bank, you are looking at a tokenised deposit. If the answer is a non-bank issuer holding reserves or other assets against the unit, you are in the third category covered in Stablecoin types, or in the hybrid Fnality construction handled in Part 3.
The chain operator is not the issuer. A central bank can run the chain on which a commercial bank issues tokens, and the unit is still commercial bank money. Conversely, a commercial bank consortium can run the chain on which a central bank issues a wCBDC token, and the unit is still central bank money. The technical hosting question and the legal liability question are separable, and conflating them is the most common categorisation error in this space. We come back to this in Part 4 under common confusions.
Why the split is load-bearing
The downstream consequences track the issuer cleanly. Risk-weighted capital, large-exposure limits, Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) and Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR) treatment, who can hold the unit, what happens at the central bank's window close, what happens cross-border, all flow from the issuer split. The next four parts work through each of those consequences. The framing point for this part is that none of them depend on the chain. They depend on whose liability the unit is. Tokenisation re-expresses the existing money tier on programmable rails. It does not invent a new tier.
The Basel Committee, working under Ben Gully and previously Pablo Hernández de Cos, has set the prudential frame through the basel sco60 cryptoasset standard in a way that maps cleanly onto the issuer split. A tokenised central bank claim that meets the Group 1a classification conditions inherits the same treatment as the underlying reserves. A tokenised commercial bank deposit inherits the same treatment as the underlying deposit. The standard does not punish the bank for the fact that the unit lives on a chain (Basel SCO60).
The next part picks up the most consequential downstream effect, which is risk-weighted capital and access. That is where the issuer split becomes a product decision rather than an abstract one.