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Episode Brief: Can Stablecoins Keep Deposits in Banks? w/ Cooper Thompson (Fiserv)

Most “stablecoin use cases for banks” talk skips the part banks actually run on: liabilities. Where deposits sit is not a side effect. It is the funding model. If stablecoin reserves end up in Treasuries or parked at GSIBs, community banks do not get a new rail. They get disintermediated from their own fuel source.

This conversation treats stablecoins as a balance sheet design problem first, and a blockchain design problem second. The bet is simple: if you want banks to adopt programmable money, you need “fiat-layer innovation” that preserves deposit economics while still gaining network connectivity.

The core ideas you should take away

• Stablecoins change where cash sits: Reserve placement determines who holds the liabilities, so stablecoins are deposit-routing tech as much as payments tech.
• Cores stay; connectivity changes: Not everything moves onchain. The near-term architecture is blockchain as connective tissue across many disconnected ledgers, not a core replacement.
• The standard collateral model doesn’t serve community banks: Parking reserves in Treasuries or at GSIBs works for mint/burn/redemption mechanics, but does nothing for banks and credit unions that need deposits to fund lending.
• FIUSD’s wedge is fiat-layer innovation: Reserves held as distributed demand deposits across a deposit network (via StoneCastle), rather than pooled in T-bills or money center bank cash.
• Near-term value is cross-border and coordination: Stablecoins likely won’t replace domestic rails for straight-through payments, but become valuable for multi-party flows and programmability niches (escrow, splitting, conditional release).
• Tokenized deposits are the longer frontier: Keeping liabilities on bank balance sheets while enabling new instruments (yield-bearing variants, tokenized CDs, tradable duration) is where liability innovation gets more interesting to banks (but unclear on demand for users).

What this changes

• Banks and credit unions: Stablecoin strategy becomes a funding strategy. The key question is not “do we support stablecoins,” it is “where do the backing liabilities land and on what terms.”
• Fintechs and issuers: “Bank-native” models shift competition toward collateral architecture and institutional distribution, not just wallet UX.
• Infrastructure builders: The integration surface is the core plus the operating model around it. Winning products look like orchestration and compliance layers that let banks touch blockchains without rewriting their ledger stack.
• Domestic networks and incumbents: Regulated payment stablecoins can add price and feature pressure even if they do not fully displace RTP/FedNow/Zelle.

What we didn’t fully resolve

• Deposit classification and incentives: Whether distributed demand deposits backing a stablecoin are treated as brokered, how that shapes bank appetite, and what happens under stress.
• Two-sided usage without DeFi liquidity: If FIUSD avoids DEX/DeFi distribution, what the durable demand drivers are inside a regulated network.
• Privacy for institutions and consumers: ZK/confidential transfer primitives exist, but governance, auditability, and regulatory comfort remain moving targets.

If you listen, listen for this

The hidden thesis is that the stablecoin debate is mispriced because it over-indexes on rails and under-indexes on liabilities. Cooper keeps pulling the conversation back to a pragmatic architecture: keep core ledgers, use blockchains to connect them, and redesign the fiat collateral layer so banks can adopt without donating deposits to the biggest balance sheets.