Weekly briefing · Edition 20 · 14 September 2026 · covering 8 to 14 September
SEBI launches Demat 2.0 pilot for tokenised corporate bonds
Edited by Cliffton Lee · Singapore · 17 items covered from 529 sources reviewed
Key points
India began tokenising its roughly $620 billion corporate bond market on 8 September 2026 under SEBI's Demat 2.0 pilot, with state lender REC issuing a ₹5 billion tokenised bond settled via wholesale digital rupee and subscribed almost eight times over, followed by L&T and IIFL issuances taking the pilot total to ₹10.25 billion ($107 million) by 9 September.
DBS, OCBC and UOB completed the first live interbank Singapore dollar tokenised deposit transactions on Swift's blockchain ledger on 10 September 2026, extending the ledger from cross-border to domestic always-on payments across all three local banks.
Nasdaq committed $100 million to Kraken parent Payward at a $21 billion valuation on 10 September 2026 and set Q2 2027 for the launch of Nasdaq Equity Tokens, the first public timeline for a tier-one exchange group's native tokenised equities.
US Bank executed a live cross-border payment using its own USBDC stablecoin on the Stellar public blockchain on 9 September 2026, an intra-group transfer between North American and European entities aimed at corporate treasury and liquidity management.
Fnality appointed former Bank of England Deputy Governor Sir Jon Cunliffe as UK chair and ex-Bundesbank director Jochen Metzger and ex-DNB oversight head Ron Berndsen to its Europe board on 10 September 2026, days ahead of the Eurosystem's Pontes go-live and a US charter extension hearing.
Singapore's three local banks moved in parallel, DBS, OCBC and UOB completing the first live interbank SGD tokenised deposit transactions on Swift's ledger on 10 September, while Nasdaq's $100 million Payward investment and Q2 2027 tokenised-equities date reset the timeline on the issuance side globally.
SEBI's Demat 2.0 pilot puts India's roughly $620 billion corporate bond market onto a distributed ledger owned by depositories NSDL and CDSL, with state lender REC issuing the first ₹5 billion ($59 million) tokenised bond on 8 September, subscribed almost eight times and drawing HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank, then L&T's ₹5 billion and IIFL's ₹250 million on 9 September taking the pilot to ₹10.25 billion ($107 million as of 9 September). The bonds are natively digital rather than digital twins, the token itself is the bond with the depository remaining authoritative under the Depositories Act, settled delivery-versus-payment against the wholesale digital rupee, and the three-stage roadmap moves from institutional-only issuance now to secondary RFQ trading and retail access, with an RBI executive signalling gold as a candidate next asset class.
Singapore's three local banks executed live domestic Singapore dollar payments using tokenised deposits on Swift's blockchain ledger on 10 September, the first interbank tokenised-deposit transactions among them, with the ledger acting as orchestration layer to match and net obligations before final settlement through existing systems. This extends the Swift ledger from its original cross-border framing into domestic always-on interbank payments, and it pairs with DBS and Citi's weekend USD transaction on 7 September, giving DBS Token Services a working bridge between its own-bank rail and cross-institution flows without relying solely on Partior.
Citi plans overseas remittance for Japanese corporates using tokenised deposits as early as this year, enabling instant foreign-currency transfers including overnight and on holidays, and says it would be the first such service for Japanese clients from a foreign financial institution. Citi moves around $6 trillion daily with roughly $1 billion of that in tokenised deposits, so this is a live extension of an operating book into a new client market rather than a pilot, positioning a foreign bank ahead of domestic peers on always-on cross-border rails for Japanese treasurers.
MUFG Asset Management has launched what it calls Japan's first domestic tokenised money market fund, structured as a tokenised investment trust with Mitsubishi UFJ Trust & Banking as trustee, seeded at ¥200 million ($1.3 million) and running on the Progmat platform MUFG founded and part-owns at around 49 percent. It is an internal group demonstration for now with institutional opening planned later, and MUFG Morgan Stanley will ultimately distribute, though the fund's short-dated government-bond holdings mirror what Japanese stablecoin issuers can hold in reserves while Japanese law bars the fund itself from serving as reserve backing, unlike the US GENIUS Act.
The Financial Services Commission set out its phasing for tokenised securities once the enabling law comes into force in February 2027, with phase one opening tokenised money market funds and bonds to institutions only, alongside unlisted stocks via trust structures and fractional investments through trust-beneficiary certificates. Phase two adds public securities and phase three introduces stablecoin settlement, but the FSC has left the later phases untimed and dependent on adoption pace and the passage of stablecoin legislation, which tells product teams the institutional MMF and bond track is the near-certain first window and the stablecoin-settlement layer remains a policy contingency.
US Bank executed a live cross-border payment on 9 September using USBDC, its own dollar-backed stablecoin, on the Stellar public blockchain, moving funds between its North American and European entities as an intra-group transfer rather than a client payment. The bank frames the use case as corporate treasury, liquidity management, collateral mobility and cross-border operations rather than consumer payments, and it sits distinct from the separate Zelle stablecoin effort, marking a major US bank moving stablecoin work from issuance capability built last November into live transactions.
Visa has opened its settlement data to onchain lenders to close the funding gap that stablecoin card programmes face, since US stablecoin cards are structured as credit cards requiring 100 percent stablecoin collateral and the issuer waits to collect from cardholder smart-contract wallets. More than 160 stablecoin-linked card programmes now run on Visa's network with payment volume up nearly 200 percent year over year and stablecoin settlement exceeding a $20 billion annualised run rate, at a scale too small for documented bank warehouse facilities to serve.
A large Indian agricultural warehousing operator plans to tokenise around $2 billion in grain-backed lending, taking tokenised private credit into commodity-collateralised agricultural finance at material volume. The commodity-backed structure is a distinct asset class from the corporate and fund credit that has dominated tokenised private credit to date, and it lands the same week India's regulator advances tokenised corporate bonds and signals gold as a candidate, suggesting a broadening asset scope across Indian tokenisation.
Nasdaq, Boerse Stuttgart and most firms licensed under the EU's DLT Pilot Regime, joined by 10 securities firms and 16 fintech associations, are asking the European Parliament and Council to scrap the €6 billion per-venue cap on tokenised securities, or failing that raise it to €1.5 trillion, and to apply any remaining caps equally to new DLT venues and incumbent CSDs. The letter points to the DTCC's US no-action letter permitting tokenisation at a hundred times the EU ceiling, and builds on the Commission's MISP proposal to lift the cap to €100 billion and broaden eligible instruments.
ESMA's H1 2026 Trends, Risks and Vulnerabilities report devotes attention to tokenised equities, noting that issuing different tokenised versions of the same stock could fragment liquidity, and questioning how many claimed tokenisation benefits are evident in the wrapped structures that grew from around €300 million to almost €1.9 billion in market cap over 18 months. The regulator's point is that offchain ownership means no onchain single source of truth, self-custody is only indirect, extra intermediary layers add risk, and atomic settlement is not happening where the cash leg still settles separately, a supervisory read rather than new rules but one that shapes how EU-prospectus issuers like xStocks, Ondo Global Markets and Robinhood are viewed.
Three CEPR academics argue the EU should mirror US redemption rules for multi-issuance dollar stablecoins rather than restrict who can redeem, since MiCA's par-value, fee-free, any-time redemption right makes the EU issuer the fastest exit in a run and would drain reserves that cover only European issuance. The logic bites because USDC already runs multi-issuance, with Circle issuing separately in the US and through its French MiCA entity on split reserves, and draft OCC GENIUS Act rules allow a two-day delay extendable to seven with fees, so a fungible-token holder anywhere can route a run to the uncapped EU entity.
UK Finance and Oliver Wyman argue the UK has built the legal and regulatory foundations for tokenised wholesale markets but not converted them into activity, with one sell-side firm describing the UK as mid-table, and press the Wholesale Digital Markets Champion role held by Chris Woolard to deliver, its 12-month programme targeting a live tokenised repo trial for Spring 2027. The framing casts the stakes as the UK's largest export industry, around £290 billion ($392 billion) of annual gross value added, warning that if next-generation market infrastructure anchors in New York, Frankfurt or Singapore, UK firms will run on rails designed and priced elsewhere.
Nasdaq is investing $100 million in Payward, Kraken's parent, at a $21 billion valuation and set Q2 2027 as the first public timeline for Nasdaq Equity Tokens, deepening a tokenised-equities partnership first announced in March, with Kraken's venues also adopting Nasdaq's market surveillance technology. Nasdaq becomes the second major exchange group to back Payward after Deutsche Börse's $200 million secondary purchase in April, follows a Payward collaboration with LSEG this month, and pairs with Nasdaq's LeveL Markets ATS acquisition and new Digital Liquidity Networks division, marking a tier-one exchange group committing capital and a date to native tokenised equities.
Fnality named former Bank of England Deputy Governor Sir Jon Cunliffe as UK chair and appointed ex-Bundesbank payments director Jochen Metzger, expected to chair, and former De Nederlandsche Bank oversight head Ron Berndsen to a new Fnality Europe supervisory board, giving it ex-central-banker representation across its UK, US and EU target jurisdictions. The timing matters, with the Eurosystem's Pontes wholesale DLT infrastructure launching within two weeks, a US charter-extension hearing scheduled next week for the innovation bank granted 18-month interim approval in April 2025, and only four banks publicly onboarded to the live UK £FnPS out of 24 institutional backers, so a US approval could shift the rollout scale.
Matter Labs has open-sourced the core of Prividium, its privacy-focused institutional blockchain platform, with the Bundesbank the first institution to deploy it self-hosted, keeping smart-contract and token data inside the central bank's environment while a cryptographic proof settles on a public chain. The access-and-roles engine is now runnable from public code without a commercial agreement, though the administration console, user-access tooling and core-banking connectors remain paid, and the platform already underpins Deutsche Bank's DAMA 2 tokenised fund, a UBS digital-gold proof of concept and Cari Network's tokenised deposits, with interoperability between institutional chains named as the next hard problem.
UK digital-asset exchange Archax received FINRA approval completing its US subsidiary's SEC broker-dealer registration, positioning Archax Markets as a route for European tokenised securities to reach US institutions under Rule 15a-6 chaperoning, with operations expected to start this quarter. The approval came 17 months after the original plan via a Globacap acquisition that fell through, and with FCA, CNMV and SEC oversight Archax offers a two-way bridge for European tokenisation firms seeking US distribution and US investors wanting European reach, a niche where Securitize has kept a lower European profile.
SIX and consumer payments app TWINT joined the six-bank Swiss franc stablecoin initiative launched in April, adding the country's core securities-settlement and retail-payments infrastructure to a CHFD token technically live in a sandbox since late June. SIX already settles tokenised assets in central bank money via SDX, but only banks can hold central bank money, so a stablecoin could extend digital settlement to asset managers, corporates and consumers, though the group is explicit the sandbox is open-ended, does not signal a launch decision, and runs to end-2026 with results published after.
Worth watching next
Whether India’s Demat 2.0 pilot moves to stage two secondary trading and retail access, and whether the RBI follows through on tokenising gold as the next asset class.
Next week’s US charter-extension hearing for Fnality’s innovation bank, and how the Pontes go-live within a fortnight interacts with Fnality’s euro-leg plans.
Whether the EU adopts the MISP €100 billion DLT Pilot Regime cap or moves toward the industry’s €1.5 trillion ask, and how it treats incumbent CSDs versus new venues.
Nasdaq’s Q2 2027 tokenised-equities launch detail, and whether Deutsche Börse and LSEG’s Payward positions converge into a shared exchange-native standard or competing ones.
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