The issuer split from Part 1 cashes out into three operational consequences that drive most institutional decisions before any engineering question is asked. Risk-weighted capital. Who can hold the unit. How the instrument behaves under atomic settlement and around-the-clock operation. Each of these falls out cleanly from whose balance sheet is on the hook.
Risk-weighted capital and the headline difference
The single fact that drives most institutional choices between wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC) and tokenised deposits is capital treatment.
A balance in wCBDC is a claim on the central bank. Under the standardised approach in the Basel Committee framework, claims on a domestic-currency central bank in domestic currency carry a zero risk weight. The institution holding wCBDC ties up no risk-weighted capital against the position. Under the basel sco60 cryptoasset standard, a tokenised central-bank claim that meets the Group 1a classification conditions inherits the same treatment as the underlying (Basel SCO60).
A balance in a tokenised deposit at Bank A, held by Bank B, is an interbank deposit at Bank A. It is treated by Bank B as an unsecured exposure to Bank A, with the risk weight that applies to claims on banks under the standardised or the internal-ratings approach, scaled by the rating or the supervisory category of Bank A. It counts against Bank B's large-exposure limits to Bank A. It enters the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) and the Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR) the way an unsecured bank deposit does, which is to say it does not score as well as central bank money on either ratio. A tokenised deposit is, for capital and liquidity purposes, the same instrument the bank already had, simply re-expressed in token form. Tokenisation does not reduce single-name credit exposure. It surfaces it more cleanly.
This single difference often determines which instrument an institution prefers for which use case. An interbank settlement leg with a billion-dollar notional cannot sit, even briefly, in a tokenised deposit at a counterparty bank if the counterparty does not have headroom under the holder's large-exposure limit. The same leg in wCBDC raises no exposure issue. Conversely, a corporate treasurer who wants to hold programmable cash overnight is unlikely to be eligible for wCBDC at all, and would land naturally in a tokenised deposit at the bank where the operating account already lives.
Who can hold each
wCBDC access mirrors reserve account access. In every jurisdiction running a serious wCBDC pilot, the holder universe is the set of institutions with central bank settlement accounts, plus a small set of designated infrastructure providers, central securities depositaries (CSDs), clearing houses, and payment system operators. Non-bank corporates do not hold wCBDC. Households do not hold wCBDC. The token does not change the access perimeter, because the perimeter is set by central bank policy and the central bank's own balance sheet considerations, not by the ledger.
Tokenised deposits can be held by anyone the issuing bank chooses to onboard, subject to KYC, AML, and the bank's own client policies. A tokenised deposit programme can be retail, corporate, institutional, or all three, and the perimeter is set by the bank's licensing and risk appetite rather than by any external constraint. This is the operational reason tokenised deposits have moved faster into client-facing products than wCBDC has. The bank already has the client. The client already has the deposit. The token sits on top of an existing relationship.
Atomicity and operating hours
Both instruments can settle atomic delivery-versus-payment (DvP) or payment-versus-payment (PvP) if the chain is architected to coordinate the legs. Atomicity is a property of the ledger and the smart contracts on top of it, not of the underlying money. Project Ensemble in hong kong has demonstrated atomic DvP between tokenised assets and wCBDC, and between tokenised assets and tokenised deposits, on the same architecture, as the HKMA's published Ensemble materials make explicit. JPMorgan's Kinexys runs atomic intraday flows in tokenised deposits today (Kinexys overview). The atomicity is not the differentiator.
Twenty-four-by-seven availability is. wCBDC depends on the central bank operating its tokenised settlement layer continuously, which most central banks have not committed to. Reserve systems globally have historically operated within defined windows, with overnight closure and weekend downtime. Moving to a 24/7 wCBDC layer is a non-trivial operational and cost commitment for the central bank, who has to staff, monitor, and stand behind the system at all hours. Several APAC central banks have signalled willingness to extend hours within pilots, but a permanent commitment to round-the-clock wCBDC is not the consensus position in 2026. Tokenised deposits, by contrast, depend on the bank's chain operating 24/7, and the larger consortium platforms (Kinexys, Partior) already do. The bank carries the operational cost. The bank prices it into its product.
The asymmetry has product consequences. A weekend cross-border tokenised deposit flow between two participating banks settles. The same flow expressed in wCBDC stops at the central bank's window unless the central bank has explicitly opened it. For agentic and client-facing flows that have no notion of business hours, this is a structural reason to design at the deposit layer rather than the wCBDC layer, a thread Chapter IX picks up in 09 agentic commerce tokenized rails.
The next part takes the comparison cross-border, where the issuer split becomes a multilateral problem rather than a domestic one, and where the Fnality variant earns its own treatment.