JPMorgan, Citi and TCH: Tokenized Deposits ON Chain

Builds on: 101 Update: CBDCs, Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits | Stablecoins: A New Model of Trust | Stablecoin Scenarios

The WSJ reported yesterday that JPMorgan, Citigroup, and TCH (a consortium of the largest US banks) are planning a shared tokenized deposit system. For anyone who has been following this space, this is not a surprise. It is a confirmation. I’ve been writing about this trajectory for years. The question was never whether banks would adopt blockchain infrastructure. The question was always how and the commercial construct that governs operation. Now we know. 

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Is Know Your Agent (KYA) Really Necessary?

Is “Know Your Agent” (KYA) Really Necessary? The tale of an Orphan Signal

Short Blog | June 2026

A new category of startup has emerged around “Know Your Agent” (KYA) — the idea that merchants and payment platforms need a framework to verify the identity, authority, and auditability of AI agents acting on behalf of consumers. PYMNTS has covered the space extensively, and KnowYourAgent.xyz is already pitching merchants on “identity, policy controls, and evidence for every AI-agent transaction at checkout.” The framing is intuitive: if a bot is buying something, shouldn’t you know who sent it?

I want to push back — not on the problem, but on whether KYA, as a standalone service category, is the right solution.

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DPCs Great Idea with a Long Way To Go

© Starpoint LLP, 2026. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted, in whole or in part, in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner. Also, see our Legal/Disclaimer (this is a highly opinionated and partially informed blog). Enterprise readers, please consider an Enterprise Subscription (not required for Starpoint Clients). 

Executive Summary

I’m fortunate to chat with a diversity of large payment network stakeholders. As most of you know, I view the challenge in payments more from a political/incentive viewpoint than a technical one. The alphabet soup of new standards is hard to keep up with, but be assured that each one has a proponent (who benefits) and a group of resistors. Innovation in a network is hard, as existing stakeholders have built assets and competitive positions based upon how things work today. Today’s blog covers DPCs. DPCs may not be the biggest threat, but they are the newest. I’m not going to attempt a deep tech dive into DPCs; my effort is focused more on the challenges faced by any new payment innovation to gain traction and scale. Network effects are hard to beat!

Why read this blog? My readers know I view identity and authentication as part of the core “bundle” of payments, and Visa/MA are the de facto identity infrastructure of the internet because they unlock the power of banks (ie KYC) within a commercial framework with active governance. Today we are breaking down the latest “threat”: Digital Payment Credentials (DPCs) within Agentic(ie Gemini, GPay). The quick summary is that DPCs are an amazing technical innovation without a commercial framework or active governance, and thus will be challenged to operate separately from established networks (just like Stablecoins). This 23 page monster blog is a breakdown of the politics and the tech.

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AP2 Donation to FIDO 

Yesterday Google donated AP2 to the FIDO Alliance , let me share my thoughts on what this means.  

  1. Effort to drive cross-industry standardization and extend Google’s established success within the FIDO ecosystem (log in with Google) while addressing the structural limitations of FIDO.
  2. A “tipping point” transition from “Identity as a Service” to “Identity as an Infrastructure,” where the mobile handset functions as the primary root of trust for autonomous commerce. Google is telling FIDO that they must incorporate elements of W3C VCs to have a future.
  3. Google’s first big public move toward device bound credentials (Titan M2, Anroid Credential Manager, Android Ready Alliance, …etc).

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Owning Your Bot’s Actions: Target Part 2

In my previous post, covering Target’s “Your Bot is Your Responsibility”  was the only move they could make. When you let an AI bot loose with your credit card, you are effectively handing your car keys to a teenager; you can’t act surprised when there’s a dent in the bumper. But Target’s stance isn’t just a legal shield; it is a flare gun fired over a massive Governance Gap. Today’s agentic commerce is high on technology and standards, but dangerously low on the commercial terms that actually make markets function. To be clear, it’s not for lack of effort from V/MA, nor is it technology; it is resistance to change.

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MPP Phase 2 Live – Ask Tom Goes Agentic

Long blog – First 2 Pages are economic implications, last 6 pages are tech deep dive

MPP is a big deal because value exchange enables specialization and market forces to operate (as discussed in last week’s MPP – Addressing the Internet’s “Original Sin”.MPP and X402 are BIG.. really big. A whole new market. This isn’t about cash replacement or taking share from xx this is about enabling a new Economy. Today’s blog is 4 paragraphs of the economic implications (for investors and CEOs), followed by 4 pages on tech detail covering what I built. Please note “Ask-Tom” is just a model of an x402 service…. of course it won’t generate much demand (service ID is at bottom).

First, let me try to explain why this is such a big deal from an economic perspective. The foundational driver for MPP’s success is the radical reduction of transaction costs through standardized commercial terms. As outlined in my 2016 blog Small Wins, the forces that once drove asset-heavy, integrated organizations are atrophying in favor of “refragmentation” and specialized networks. Historically, the economic cost of inking a bilateral contract for every micro-interaction was prohibitive (ex “Account Creation” bottleneck that stifled agentic autonomy). Following the principles of Ronald Coase’s Transaction Cost Economics, MPP and x402 provide the multilateral governance and common commercial rules necessary to bypass these friction points. By establishing trust and speed through a common interface, these protocols allow for the “Small Win” of a single transaction to scale into a global network effect, where the cost of connection approaches zero.

This standardization enables the “Value Assembly” of “super-specialists” who can target previously unreachable “shale deposits” of niche market demand (see Network Effects and Value Assembly). A successful network enables specialists like “Ask-Tom” to provide high-value, grounded intelligence without the overhead of building independent settlement or reconciliation infrastructure. This is far beyond mere “agentic commerce”; it is an evolution in how software and hardware interact with EVERYTHING ECONOMICALLY. For example, MPP’s session-based economics provides a virtual “bar tab” for agents to execute tasks within human-granted budgets, paying only for precise resource consumption. This creates a sustainable commercial model where the incentives for specialization and market forces to operate on software service at a hyper granular level. Market forces in turn encourage specialists to solve increasingly granular problems across diverse domains, and unlocks the “shale deposits” of data that doesn’t play. I’ll discuss what this could look like next week as a follow up to Value Assembly.

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Why eIDAS Will Fail in Banking

Real World Examples

Two weeks ago I penned eIDAS – EU’s Digital Siege. If you didn’t read it, the summary is that EU’s scheme is another attempt to end run BigTech and Visa/Mastercard with a set of “keys” in a digital wallet that are separate from any bank, platform or handset. While technically brilliant, trust requires either a legal mandate, or a commercial construct (and I explain why in the blog). 

Today I’m going to provide a few layman’s examples of why eIDAS will not work in Financial Services (beyond acting as a signal). What is the problem the EU is working to solve? Unfortunately there is not single answer here, just like PSD2/PSD2/SEPA.. “Build it and they will come” (see blog on the EU’s Nobel Prize winner behind IFR – Jean Triole). If the core problem were “How do we prove something cryptographically across borders?”, eIDAS would already be a success.

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Genius Law – What to Expect?

Yesterday President Trump signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act into law, clearing the path for dollar-backed stablecoins. As I’ve argued before, the future of money is a new model of trust, and this legislation provides the regulatory certainty needed for that trust. 

The GENIUS Act is a landmark piece of legislation. It establishes a dual charter system, enabling both federal and state-regulated stablecoin issuers. The key provisions are precisely what the industry needed: a mandate for 1:1 reserves with high-quality liquid assets like cash and short-term treasuries, a prohibition on reusing those reserves, and the designation of issuers as financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act. This isn’t just about compliance; it’s about building a foundation of trust that can be exported globally.

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Understanding Payments Data – How it Plays Today and the Near Term Future

© Starpoint LLP, 2024. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted, in whole or in part, in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner. Also, see our Legal/Disclaimer (this is a highly opinionated and partially informed blog). Enterprise readers, please consider Enterprise Subscription (not required for Starpoint Clients). 

I thought it was time for a payment data update. Given Paypal’s Feb 2025 investor day, JPM’s “Retail Media Network” now re-labled Media Solutions and JPM’s lawsuit against Transunion/Argus. My perspective is formed from my 8 yrs as CEO/Founder of Commerce Signals. I’ll touch on signals, intent and agentic at the end. 

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Programmable Money – Coins and Cards

Overview

Today we discuss programmable money, a concept that merges smart contract functionality with digital tokens operating on distributed ledger technology (DLT). We trace the historical development from open decentralized finance (DeFi) to the adoption of permissioned systems by leading financial institutions, analyze the technical distinctions between public and private blockchains, and emphasize the necessity of robust governance for scalable deployment. The paper further examines real-world use cases in high-value asset transactions and the growing relevance of programmable money in agentic commerce, highlighting the role of stablecoins and card networks in enabling trusted, logic-driven payments.

There is a payment geek battle of concepts in Agentic commerce. Conceptually, stablecoins and smart contracts provide a better technical architecture for agentic. However, it is my firm belief that these new technologies will be used by existing networks and stakeholders rather than a completely new set of participants and approaches. For example, Visa and Mastercard are likely to remain both the primary off ramp for Stablecoin (ie card merchant acceptance) AND ALSO retain their role in standards, governance, identity, economics and how programmability operates with regulated stakeholders.

I know many of my colleagues will disagree with my views here, that is OK as the dialog will help us all. As such, your comments are welcome.

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