DALLAS FED WARNS 24/7 TOKENIZED DEPOSITS COULD DRAIN $580 BILLION FROM BANK LENDING CAPACITY — SPEED OF THE TRANSFER ISN'T SPEED OF THE SETTLEMENT

Banks have run this trick since the day banking began: take money people expect back tomorrow, lend it out for thirty years, and hope everyone doesn't ask for it back at once. It worked because moving money was slow and annoying. A wire took a day. A check took three. That friction was the safety net nobody admitted was doing the job. Two researchers at the Dallas Fed just did the math on what happens when the friction disappears. Tokenized deposits move in seconds, any hour, and soon an algorithm will chase whichever bank pays the best yield without a human touching a button. Eighty percent of the $7 trillion in risk sitting on bank books depends on deposits staying put out of habit and hassle. Take away the hassle and the Fed's own model says $580 billion in lending capacity goes with it. Nobody stole anything. Nobody broke a rule. The banks built a system that only works if people are too slow to leave, and now everyone is handing them a faster door. As one researcher put it, the speed of a token transfer does not mean the underlying claim settles at the same speed. Bitcoin never asked you to trust that the door stays slow.