Rimark × IBAT: Modern Money for Main Street
A partnership to put bank-governed, real-time settlement in the hands of community banks — on rails they own.
Community banks were told to prepare to be disrupted. They organized instead.
Today, Rimark and the Independent Bankers Association of Texas (IBAT) announced a partnership to bring real-time, bank-governed settlement to America's community banks. IBAT selected Rimark as a technology partner for IBAT DTX — its initiative to give community banks tokenized-deposit infrastructure they own and control.
More than 60 community banks have already backed the pilot. Rimark brings the settlement technology itself: Solstice Protocol, a real-time network for issuing and settling tokenized deposits that keeps them on the bank's own balance sheet — governed by Project CODA, the bank-led consortium that sets the network's rules.
Rimark's contribution comes in two pieces:
- Solstice Protocol is the product Rimark delivers — a modular distributed-ledger suite, not a single rail. It runs in two layers: Solstice Core, which a bank operates inside its own walls to issue and manage tokenized deposits, and Solstice Network, the shared layer where those deposits settle between institutions in real time. Both carry compliance and post-quantum security in the protocol itself, and because the suite is modular, Solstice can stand up a dedicated, member-governed network for a consortium rather than force every institution onto one generic rail.
- Project CODA is the governance layer on top of it — the bank-and-regulator consortium that sets the standards and network rules, which Solstice then enforces in code. Rimark builds and operates the technology; the member banks, through CODA, own the rulebook. No single company can quietly change the terms on a network its members govern.
Formed in 1974 and based in Austin, IBAT is the largest state community-banking organization in the country, representing more than 2,000 banks and branches across 700 Texas communities — institutions that hold from $27 million to $50 billion in assets each, and $256 billion combined.
Its members are moving for two reasons at once: the opportunity modern settlement opens up, and the risk of being left behind if they wait. IBAT's president and CEO, Christopher Williston, is direct about the second.
“The work of IBAT DTX is essential to ensure that community banks retain their central and trusted role in deposit ownership,” he said. “We cannot afford the economic consequences of community banks being left behind in the next phase of financial services innovation.”
What Rimark supplies is more specific than “faster payments.” On Solstice Protocol, a tokenized deposit settles atomically — both sides of a transfer move together or not at all — in real time rather than the days a wire can take. Compliance travels inside the asset itself: transfer rules, required documentation, and an auditable record ride with every token instead of being reconstructed by hand afterward. The deposit never leaves the regulated perimeter — it stays on the issuing bank's balance sheet, stays insured, and stays the bank's customer.
These are tokenized deposits, not a stablecoin that moves value off the bank's books. Solstice Protocol itself is built on post-quantum cryptography — the rail is hardened against a threat regulators have already begun to name, security that lives in the protocol rather than in the bank's existing systems. A bank connects to it without replacing the core it runs today.
“Solstice Protocol brings community banks real-time settlement and tokenized deposits — technology the biggest banks have kept to themselves — and Project CODA lets those banks govern it themselves,” said Jeremy Vaughn, Rimark's founder and CEO. “That's a genuinely new thing in banking, and it's the opportunity we started Rimark for. We're excited to build something Rimark-able with IBAT.”
That is why this begins in Texas rather than ends there. CODA is built so that a bank with $27 million in assets and a bank with $50 billion answer to the same rules, indifferent to which is which. Over the coming months, Rimark and the member banks will refine and prove out the network — the pilot testing it where the stakes are highest and the room to build alone is smallest. The model itself has no ceiling: settlement that keeps deposits insured, customers local, and standards member-owned is not a small-bank feature. It is what banking infrastructure should have been all along — arriving first in the places the industry had written off.
Community banks were supposed to be a casualty of disruption. Instead, they are helping write the rules the rest of banking will follow.
