Cari

The profile

Cari exists to keep the tokenized dollar a bank liability. Its own framing is that deposits represented by Cari tokens 'remain regulated bank liabilities held on participating banks' balance sheets and subject to existing oversight and FDIC insurance', which is the structural claim that separates a tokenized deposit from a stablecoin issued by a non-bank against a reserve pool. The company was founded by Eugene A. Ludwig, who was the 27th Comptroller of the Currency and who then built Promontory Financial Group and Promontory Interfinancial Network, the deposit-placement network of roughly 3,000 member banks now called IntraFi; the same shape recurs here, in shared infrastructure owned and governed by the banks that use it rather than sold to them. Six Design Partner Banks have co-developed the network since September 2025, First Horizon, Huntington, KeyBank, M&T, Old National and SouthState, and the Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America has endorsed the approach. The ledger is Matter Labs' Prividium, a permissioned privacy-preserving chain anchored to Ethereum, chosen in March 2026 so that verified counterparties can transact continuously while transaction data stays private and auditable. Banks connect through an API layer and run the full lifecycle of a tokenized deposit, minting, transferring and burning. The build reached a minimum viable product on 31 March 2026 and a full product suite on 31 July, covering programmability, a wallet interface and an operational portal, and remains in pilot rather than production. More than thirty banks have joined and more than forty are in discussion, which Cari puts at over $10tn of combined assets across network and pipeline. In September 2026 it raised $32.5m in the first tranche of its initial external round, entirely from banks, with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods advising.