Off-ledger currency is money whose actual record of ownership is kept somewhere other than the ledger being discussed. From a blockchain's point of view, the US dollar in a bank account is off-ledger: the bank's books, not the chain, decide who owns it. Such money can be brought onto a blockchain only indirectly, by an issuer holding the real funds and creating a token or IOU that represents a claim on them, which is how a fiat-backed stablecoin works. The holder of the token then depends on the issuer to honour redemption. The phrase is used mainly in discussions of tokenisation and ledger design and has no single formal definition. Its counterpart, on-ledger currency, is native to the ledger itself. Also see commercial bank money.
Last updated 13 Nov 2026