Sygnum's APAC Tokenization Report 2026 maps allocation behaviour across Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea

The European Central Bank set 21 September 2026 for Pontes to go live, giving institutions two ways to settle DLT transactions in central bank money, cash tokens on the Eurosystem's own DLT or a trigger model where the chain initiates a conventional payment through TARGET's T2 real-time gross settlement system. Institutions had to register the production environment with their national central bank by 7 August 2026 to be in the first cohort, with testing starting in early August and later joining always open, so the near-term work is the demonstrated-testing sign-off each national central bank requires. The dual-model design, keeping the trigger route alive alongside native on-chain cash, is the ECB hedging against forcing every participant onto the Eurosystem ledger, and it puts a production euro central-bank-money leg on the table ahead of the US and UK, both of which remain in framework or pilot phase.

Wells Fargo will offer tokenised deposits for select corporate and commercial clients later this year on its proprietary blockchain, starting with a limited round-the-clock US dollar-to-sterling exchange and expanding to more clients, currencies, and jurisdictions through 2027. The differentiator is auto-routing, since the bank says it will move eligible payments through the tokenised rail automatically when doing so improves speed or flexibility, without changing how clients interface with the bank, and these remain commercial bank money carrying the same deposit-insurance eligibility as conventional balances.

Researchers at the New York and Boston Feds analysed Circle's post-SVB reserve restructuring, finding the Circle Reserve Fund's weighted average maturity fell to among the shortest of any Treasury-only money-market fund, reverse-repo holdings surged from zero to over 90% before settling at 69%, centrally cleared sponsored repos grew to 77% of the repo book by Q4 2025, and bank deposits shifted toward GSIBs while falling from 20-25% of reserves pre-SVB to 12-15% since 2024. The study reads Circle's moves as reducing interest-rate and counterparty risk after the $3.3 billion SVB exposure that triggered USDC's de-peg.

BlackRock issued 12 new tokenised share classes across 6 UCITS funds in its Institutional Cash Series, in dollar, euro, and sterling, tokenised via JPMorgan's Kinexys on public Ethereum and available across 15 markets including Singapore and the UK, a day after adding two GENIUS Act-aligned tokenised cash products in the US. The stated purposes are liquidity for corporate treasurers and collateral mobility, and Amundi's June deal supplying Ant International's corporate treasury signals demand reaching beyond digital-native holders, though one open operational question is precisely when a token transfer becomes legally binding against the JPMorgan-maintained register out of hours.

BlackRock unveiled an Ethereum tokenised share class of its Select Treasury Based Liquidity Fund (BSTBL) plus a new Daily Reinvestment Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle (BRSRV) with Securitize as transfer agent, both intended to qualify as eligible reserve assets for permitted US payment stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act. CFO Martin Small has said the firm wants to be the stablecoin reserve manager of choice, noting it already manages $60 billion of Circle's reserves, roughly a quarter of the stablecoin market.

Dinari opened 724 tokenised US equities, including the full S&P 500, to eligible US investors via self-custody wallets, purchasable with Circle's USDC across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, and Avalanche through its regulated broker-dealer and transfer-agent infrastructure. The launch follows Ondo Finance's SEC-aligned tokenised-stock framework and intensifies a domestic equity-tokenisation race, though Dinari remains small at roughly $10 million of the $2.2 billion tokenised-stock market.

Wellington Management's second tokenised fund with Libeara, the Standard Chartered SC Ventures-incubated tokenisation firm, and FundBridge Capital, INCOM, shifts from the short-Treasury focus of the earlier ULTRA fund to a diversified fixed-income book spanning investment-grade and high-yield corporates, bank loans, convertibles, securitised assets, and government bonds. Wellington acts as sub-adviser with FundBridge as manager, the same structure as before, issued on public blockchains for allocator-facing transparency and efficiency.

Tether will supply the tokenisation infrastructure for institutional real estate in Saudi Arabia through its Hadron platform, with First Data as issuer and market operator and BKN301 connecting banking and compliance systems, framed as a Vision 2030 modernisation play that could later extend to energy and infrastructure finance. This is an operational expansion into a new regulated jurisdiction rather than live flows, so the read is positioning for now.

Circle set 16 September 2026 for its Arc mainnet and unveiled a founding validator cohort spanning BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, and Visa, positioning Arc across tokenised-asset settlement, custody, and FX and repo. Arc will become a supported chain for the DTCC Tokenization Service in the second half of 2027, and its permissioned validator set of regulated institutions makes it a straightforward candidate for the SEC no-action letter's pre-approved-chain requirement, with BlackRock expected to deploy its BUIDL fund onto the network.

Circle reported USDC circulation of $73.3 billion at end-June 2026, up 19% year on year but below its 2026 peak near $80 billion, with onchain transaction volume up 151% to $14.8 trillion for the quarter, alongside more than 100 institutional builders developing on Arc ahead of the 16 September mainnet. CEO Jeremy Allaire framed BlackRock, BNY, and Standard Chartered as expanding rather than piloting, the operative distinction between logo participation and operational flow.

XRPL version 3.3.0 proposes a Confidential Transfers amendment that would encrypt balances and payment amounts on Multi-Purpose Tokens while keeping accounts and token types visible, targeting the roughly $1.38 billion of tokenised real-world assets already on the ledger, including positions from RLUSD, Ondo, VERT Capital, Archax, and Societe Generale. The amendment and five other institutional-focused changes still need at least two weeks of 80% validator support before going live, so this is a proposal awaiting consensus rather than a shipped feature.