Stablecoins and deposit tokens
Banks issue two shapes of regulated money on SQRL: payment stablecoins, fully reserved claims transferable to any whitelisted holder, and deposit tokens, transfer-restricted bank liabilities held only by the issuer's customers or consortium members. Both use the same token standard and the same issuer controls: screening, authorised-participant redemption, and circulating supply checked against attested reserves at every block.
Issuers run their stablecoin from SQRL Enterprise. This page explains the moving parts and where each one is enforced.
#The token
The asset is an SCL contract on the SQRL token standard, administered by a quorum vault, with a hard supply cap, separated minter, burner, pauser and compliance roles, a whitelist, and reason-coded freeze, clawback and pause. Nothing about the token depends on SQRL's servers: its rules are enforced by the contract and its admin is a Bitcoin multi-signature script.
A deposit token can run on the canonical ledger or inside the issuing bank's own subnet. On a subnet, holders and balances stay on the bank's firewalled infrastructure, and the network sees only state-root commitments anchored to Bitcoin. The contract, its controls and its replay rules are identical either way.
#Controls, and where they run
| Control | Enforced by | When |
|---|---|---|
| Quorum approval | Bitcoin (the vault's script) | Every administrative action and every movement out of a vault |
| Supply cap | The contract | Every mint |
| Whitelist | The contract (holders) and SQRL Enterprise (recipients) | Every transfer and mint |
| Freeze, clawback, pause | The contract | On a compliance officer's quorum-signed call |
| Sanctions screening | SQRL Enterprise, through the issuer's provider (TRM Labs, Chainalysis or Elliptic) | Before a mint or transfer becomes a transaction |
| Travel Rule | SQRL Enterprise | Transfers at and above the issuer's threshold |
| Maker-checker | SQRL Enterprise role separation | Every action type |
#Mint and redeem
Authorised participants (APs) are the institutions an issuer allows to create and redeem tokens directly. A mint request is fulfilled when the AP's fiat payment reaches the issuer's bank; a redemption pays fiat out once the tokens are burned. The on-chain half is an ordinary quorum-signed mint or burn call, linked to the request by its redemption_ref. A request completes only when both legs have cleared. See Redemption.
#Supply against attested reserves
Circulating supply is recomputed from the chain at every block and compared with the issuer's reserve attestation feed. Supply is proven; reserves are attested by the issuer. Coverage is published per asset, auditors read the same data through the auditor API, and regulators get read-only access. A divergence beyond tolerance raises an alert to the compliance role. See Reserves and attestation.
#Supervision
Issuer contracts expose observer roles: designated keys with read access to holder lists, balances and event history. A supervisor's observer node replays the instruments it regulates from public anchors. See Subnets and routing.
Key takeaway
Supply is a fact on Bitcoin, controls are rules in the contract, and every issuer action leaves a reason-coded public event. A stablecoin on SQRL can be audited from the chain up.