Week ending 26 July 2026

The second phase of the Bank of Korea's CBDC programme begins real-transaction testing in September 2026 with 9 banks, including KB Kookmin, Shinhan, Hana, and Woori plus regionals Gyeongnam Bank and iM Bank, on an architecture where the central bank provides the institutional CBDC layer and each bank issues and manages its own deposit tokens on top. A BOK official framed phase 2 explicitly as laying the groundwork for commercialisation, which makes this the wholesale-settled deposit-token counterweight to the stablecoin bill moving through the National Assembly on the same September calendar.

Bank of China's Shenzhen branch settled RMB 11.3 billion ($1.67 billion) over mBridge in June 2026 and its Fujian branch received HKD 10 billion ($1.28 billion) in July, the Hong Kong dollar leg being the notable part given renminbi has carried more than 95% of mBridge volume to date. The bank puts its own mBridge volumes above RMB 600 billion ($88.7 billion) as of end-June 2026, though intra-group sends and receives may double-count, and PBOC figures showed RMB 387 billion platform-wide as of late 2025, so the growth curve is steep whichever number holds.

Julius Baer's client-facing service page describes direct crypto holdings custodied through a partnership with AMINA Bank across hot and cold storage, indirect exposure via ETPs and structured products, and case-by-case crypto-as-collateral financing, with availability varying by client domicile and booking entity. That is a third distinct private-bank shelf architecture alongside the third-party tokenised-fund distribution model and the own-brand issuance model.

The ruling Democratic Party and financial regulators committed on 20 July 2026 to reintroducing the Framework Act on Digital Assets in September, with the Political Affairs Committee's bill subcommittee meeting at least twice a month through the second half of 2026. The stall mechanism is the 51 per cent rule, whether a won stablecoin must be issued through a bank-centred consortium holding a majority stake, a structure the Bank of Korea backs, and the accelerated pace is framed against dollar stablecoins reaching Korean users under the GENIUS Act before a regulated won alternative exists.

AZ-COM Maruwa Holdings, a Tokyo-listed logistics firm with JPY 230.5 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ended March 2026, will pay outsourcing fees to around 2,300 subcontractors and independent truck drivers in JPYC, the Payment Services Act-regulated yen stablecoin whose onchain circulation passed JPY 2 billion as of mid-July 2026, and is weighing a JPY 1 billion investment in the issuer. The rationale is competitive, not technological: instant, fee-free settlement as a recruiting tool for drivers amid Japan's logistics labour crunch, with the side benefit that JPYC can convert to a dollar stablecoin for instant remittance by foreign drivers.

Ondo Global Markets will tokenise Japanese stocks, use JPYSC, the trust-type stablecoin issued by SBI Shinsei Trust Bank, and distribute its tokenised stocks through the SBI Group, likely including SBI Securities. The caveat that matters operationally: Ondo's tokenised stocks, just over $1 billion outstanding as of 20 July 2026, are loan notes backed 1-for-1 by shares held at Alpaca and issued by an unregulated BVI entity, with holders taking a secured claim rather than ownership.

BNY plans to pilot tokenised Treasuries on its private blockchain by the end of 2026 and offer 24/7 settlement for both conventional and tokenised Treasuries in 2027, having already settled a Treasury trade after Fedwire Securities closed, between Ripple and Dreyfus acting for OpenEden, on its own books as reserve custodian for both stablecoins. The demonstration proves the hub position rather than new technology: with $24.3 trillion in average daily triparty clearance and the reserves behind USDC, RLUSD, and USDO all custodied in-house, after-hours settlement works when both counterparties are inside the tent, in commercial bank money.

The European Central Bank confirmed on 24 July 2026 that it will begin implementing its enhanced repo facility for central banks, a euro liquidity line that shapes how the euro cash leg backstops cross-border and tokenised repo activity as those markets scale.

The undisclosed strategic investment brings RLUSD into Notabene Flow, the B2B stablecoin payments platform sitting on a Travel Rule network of more than 2,300 institutions across 100 jurisdictions handling over $2 trillion in annualised messaging volume as of July 2026, messaging rather than payment flows.

Relay, which has processed more than $40 billion in cross-chain volume since 2024, replaced per-chain USDC inventory with a single Gateway balance spendable across 12 supported chains, replenishing a drained destination chain in under 500 milliseconds instead of waiting on a rebalance.

KAIO, the ADGM-based platform formerly known as Libre and co-founded by Nomura's Laser Digital, launched a tokenised version of one of Mubadala Capital's evergreen private markets strategies across Base, Solana, and Sui, attracting roughly $75 million in onchain assets as of 23 July 2026; Mubadala Capital manages and advises on over $600 billion, with more than $60 billion in core alternatives. Coinbase adding the product to its own corporate balance sheet rather than merely distributing it is the operational-participation signal that separates this from the logo-on-a-press-release tier.

CEO Ronald O'Hanley said on the quarterly earnings call that a major European asset manager has signed as the first external client for the Luxembourg tokenised money-market fund servicing announced in April, stacking fund administration, custody, and transfer agency on the Taurus-built Digital Asset Platform, against Clearstream, Euroclear, and Apex already in production.

Farmers in Paraná registered 10 tokenised dairy cows on the B3 exchange and raised nearly $20,000 in credit as of 24 July 2026; agtech firm Cowmed's AI collars stream health and location data into an encrypted per-animal identity that prevents double-pledging, and with around 100,000 cows worth over $395 million already monitored as of July 2026, it sees up to $77.6 million in potential new agricultural credit. Tiny money, but a working template for telemetry-verified movable collateral on a regulated exchange.

Broadridge's Robert Krugman said at TokenizeThis 2026 that his firm now moves roughly $370 billion of tokenised repo daily on the Canton Network, a sliver of the $12 trillion US repo market but a real one, at a conference where tokenised RWAs were cited past $30 billion as of July 2026 and an EY-Coinbase survey put asset managers wanting to tokenise at 64%, up from 40% a year earlier.

Kraken parent Payward inked a deal with GTN to tokenise international stocks beginning with Hong Kong names, with the UK, Europe, and South Korea planned; xStocks has passed $35 billion in transaction volume and nearly 200,000 holders as of July 2026, though the tokens are Jersey-issued tracker certificates under Swiss ledger-based securities law with KYC only at the ramps, not equities.

SEC filings show Hanwha Group holds 9.7% of Securitize across group entities, ahead of Blockchain Capital at 6.1% and Morgan Stanley at 5%, following the 2 July SPAC listing that raised $400 million; the market capitalisation stood at about $1.06 billion as of 21 July 2026, and Hanwha has separately put ₩30 billion ($20 million) into Digital Asset and backed ADDX since 2020.

Industry figures told CoinDesk that the early-2027 digital gilt pilot via HSBC and the London Stock Exchange Group likely survives the change of government, since the remit sits with HM Treasury, the Bank of England, and the FCA, but that the binding constraint is settlement: no robust sterling stablecoin, no standardised onchain payment method, and therefore no functioning secondary market regardless of issuance success.

Commissioner Hester Peirce said on 22 July 2026 that crypto vaults and onchain lending strategies may fall under federal securities laws depending on structure and management, with curated vaults holding $8.6 billion across 788 vaults and 1.4 million users as of July 2026, and Coinbase and Robinhood both routing customer stablecoin balances into them for yield.

The BIS working paper finds both forms of dollarisation share macro-financial drivers and both persist once established, but stablecoin flows appear largely unaffected by foreign exchange and capital flow restrictions, in contrast to deposit dollarisation, with little evidence of substitution between the two.

The securities regulator's group, drawing on 14 CVM departments with a 120-day mandate extendable by 30, must deliver a regulatory sandbox proposal to the board within 60 days of installation, covering the questions blockchains collapse together: who holds the official ownership record, private key custody, transaction reversibility, and system liability, in a market already at roughly 12 billion reais ($2.34 billion) of tokenised real-world assets as of July 2026.

The self-styled Global Dollar Bank raised a Tiger Global-led Series B at a $1 billion valuation on 21 July 2026, and the consequential detail sits underneath the funding: the OCC granted preliminary conditional approval in May 2026 for a full-service national bank charter, deposits, lending, FDIC insurance, and, most significantly, eligibility for a Federal Reserve master account, of which fewer than 10 have been granted since 2010. That is a different instrument from the trust charters digital asset firms have been collecting, because a master account means clearing dollars directly rather than renting access from correspondents.

The entirely conditional announcement sketches two phases: near-term trading of digitally native Reg D securities across the OTC Link ATS broker-dealer network, then, contingent on regulation, tokenised versions of OTC stocks themselves, with OCC-chartered BitGo Bank and Trust holding the underlying and issuing entitlements on the Cede & Co model.

Standard Chartered's custody-infrastructure spinout now deploys inside the TCS BaNCS securities stack used by Citi and JPMorgan among others, with the bank retaining private keys, the custodian relationship, and governance while BaNCS manages the lifecycle from order instruction through onchain delivery and reconciliation.

SC Ventures becomes the fifth systemically important bank to fund the Canton Network developer in 18 months, after BNY, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, and HSBC, and Shinhan Financial Group is the second major Korean backer after Hanwha's ₩30 billion ($20 million), following Shinhan's June collaboration deal citing global distribution of Korean assets; the timing sits directly ahead of DTCC's October rollout of tokenised securities using Canton alongside its own private chain.

Uniswap Labs rolled out infrastructure letting issuers of tokenised funds, equities, and other regulated assets enforce investor eligibility directly onchain while using the protocol's automated market maker, with Securitize, Superstate, and Dowgo as launch partners.

The 37-page paper from Kinexys by J.P. Morgan and the MIT Digital Currency Initiative identifies four unresolved challenges for financial institutions on public chains, front-running (including a target front-running its own freeze by watching the mempool), transaction censorship, unsolicited tokens, and gas fees flowing to sanctioned validators, and concludes that the layers institutions can actually reach, application and smart contract, mostly mitigate symptoms while durable fixes sit at protocol and governance layers they do not control.