Weekly briefing · Edition 22 · 28 September 2026 · covering 22 to 28 September
PBoC to issue Renminbi Bills through the HKMA's Central Moneymarkets Unit
Edited by Cliffton Lee · Singapore · 23 items covered from 466 sources reviewed
Key points
The Eurosystem launched Pontes on 21 September 2026, its production settlement solution for tokenised transactions in central bank money, with four DLT operators onboarded including Clearstream and SWIAT, while the ECB simultaneously committed to invest part of its own funds in tokenised euro-denominated public sector securities settled via Pontes.
The People's Bank of China will issue Renminbi Bills through the HKMA's Central Moneymarkets Unit, routing offshore RMB debt issuance directly through Hong Kong's settlement infrastructure and reshaping the offshore RMB market.
Seven UK banks including Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest and Santander completed the world's first live customer transactions using tokenised sterling deposits on Quant's shared Great British Tokenised Deposit platform on 24 September 2026, including two live remortgage completions with locked funds.
The Federal Reserve issued two GENIUS Act rulemaking proposals on 24 September 2026, taking the lightest reserve approach of the three federal regulators but the most prescriptive on capital, while the CFTC clarified that futures brokers may invest customer funds in tokenised MMFs and Treasuries held at permitted depositories.
KEB Hana Bank issued a $100 million digital bond via Euroclear's D-FMI on 21 September 2026 with Standard Chartered as sole lead manager, becoming the first Korean issuer on that platform, and Canada's big six banks announced a joint tokenised deposit initiative.
Happy National Day to readers in Hong Kong, and a warm Chuseok to those in Korea returning from the holiday. Week ending 28 September 2026, covering 22 to 28 September 2026. The most material development is the Eurosystem bringing Pontes live on 21 September, its production solution for settling tokenised transactions in central bank money, with four DLT operators onboarded and the European Central Bank committing to invest part of its own funds in tokenised euro-denominated public sector securities settled across it. That combination matters because it closes the settlement-asset gap that has kept tokenised issuance dependent on commercial-bank money, and it puts the ECB on the buy side rather than only the rule-setting side. Hong Kong and China moved on the offshore RMB rail in parallel, the PBoC set to issue Renminbi Bills through the HKMA's Central Moneymarkets Unit, and seven UK banks ran the first live customer transactions on a shared tokenised-deposit platform.
The People's Bank of China will issue Renminbi Bills directly through the HKMA's Central Moneymarkets Unit, routing offshore RMB sovereign paper through Hong Kong's own settlement infrastructure rather than a mainland venue. This turns the CMU into the primary book-entry and settlement layer for offshore RMB debt, and it gives Hong Kong the anchor issuance flow that tokenised-bond and wholesale-CBDC programmes under Project EnsembleTX have lacked, since a regular sovereign RMB supply is exactly the high-quality collateral a DLT repo and settlement market needs to bootstrap.
Hana became the first Korean issuer on Euroclear's D-FMI platform, placing a $100 million digitally native note under its existing $10 billion Global Medium Term Note Programme with Standard Chartered as sole lead manager and Citi as fiscal agent, less than a month after Standard Chartered issued its own bond on the same rails. The signal is that Korean issuers are now reaching for mature international DLT infrastructure rather than a domestic pilot, following Mirae Asset Securities, POSCO International and Korea Housing Finance Corporation, which issued in Hong Kong earlier this year.
Saudi Arabia has exited mBridge after completing a proof of concept in May 2025 without ever publicly processing a live transaction, leaving the platform's core to China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the UAE, with Macau live earlier this year. The operational read is that mBridge is consolidating around committed participants rather than expanding, and that the digital RMB dominated 95% of volumes through 2025, so the platform functions more as an RMB settlement corridor than a neutral multi-currency network.
Pakistan is exploring a link to the Arab Monetary Fund's Buna platform to compress cost and settlement time on Persian Gulf remittance corridors, a material flow for a country where remittances are a core external-account line. The detail worth watching is whether the link leans on tokenised settlement rails, which would place it alongside the region's other cross-border experiments rather than as a conventional correspondent-banking upgrade.
Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander ran the first live customer transactions on the Great British Tokenised Deposit platform, built by Quant and coordinated by UK Finance, covering two remortgage completions and a consumer purchase. The distinctive feature is the retail focus and the fund-locking mechanism used in every pilot, which held cash for the remortgage completions and released it on settlement while it kept earning interest, a contingent-payment capability conventional deposits do not offer. Each bank runs its own tokenised-deposit solution, so the platform is a messaging and clearing layer for interoperability rather than a shared ledger.
BMO, CIBC, National Bank, RBC, Scotiabank and TD announced a joint Canadian-dollar tokenised deposit initiative, days after OSFI confirmed tokenised deposits are not legally distinct from conventional deposits. The first phase targets interbank movement across Canadian institutions, with a longer-term goal of connecting to third-party digital asset initiatives, and the banks anticipate adding other deposit-takers over time.
Bitpanda expanded its tie-up with Raiffeisen Bank International to cover the Austrian group's full CEE network, potentially reaching around 18 million customers, with Bitpanda Enterprise providing the trading, custody and infrastructure layer. This scales the model first proven in Austria in 2024, where a Raiffeisen entity became the first traditional EU bank to offer crypto trading inside its existing banking environment.
ARK is tokenising its ARK Venture Fund through Securitize, first on Ethereum with other networks to follow, bringing exposure to private technology companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks onchain. This pushes tokenisation past the Treasury and MMF products that anchored the first wave into diversified private-market exposure, and Securitize shares jumped as much as 15% on the news, nearly doubling in the week since the SEC's innovation exemption.
Binance invested $100 million in Circle shares and signed a new five-year commercial agreement to promote and integrate USDC, echoing the distributor-shareholder model Circle already runs with Coinbase. The measurable effect is already visible, with USDC-quoted spot markets on Binance rising from 140 at the December 2024 partnership to 329 now per Kaiko, and monthly USDC volume roughly doubling to consistently above $80 billion, though analysts caution Tether's deeper local liquidity in emerging markets is hard to dislodge.
A joint report from the Association for Financial Markets in Europe and the European Association of Corporate Treasurers argues DLT has crossed from capital-markets experimentation into practical treasury tooling, with the clearest near-term payoffs in cross-border payments, collateral mobility, intraday liquidity and tokenised fixed income. It cites tokenised MMFs from BlackRock, JPMorgan, State Street and BNP Paribas letting corporates invest surplus cash intraday, and notes global DLT-based fixed-income issuance reached EUR 1.69 billion by end-2025, a 629% rise on 2021.
The CFTC updated its FAQ to confirm that certain tokenised money-market funds and Treasuries are acceptable investments for customer funds held by futures commission merchants and clearing houses, provided the token is held at a permitted depository and carries the same legal rights as the conventional asset. Stablecoins remain excluded, but the guidance explicitly opens tokenised MMFs for uncleared-swap margin, and it aligns with the recently amended margin rules that now accept MMFs using repo and securities lending.
The Fed became the third federal regulator to propose stablecoin rules under the GENIUS Act, requiring full backing with permissible reserves and standardised capital requirements, plus a tailored application process for Board-supervised banks seeking to issue. On reserves the Fed took the lightest approach of the three, imposing none of the single-institution caps or maturity limits the OCC and FDIC proposed, while on capital it is the most prescriptive, and its scope is narrow for now, covering stablecoin subsidiaries of state-member banks and uninsured state depositories above $10 billion.
ESMA will launch a Union Strategic Supervisory Priority on digital innovation from 2027, focused initially on how supervised firms use AI and tokenised products in core client-facing activities rather than back-office operations. This marks the EU's shift from writing crypto rules under MiCA to examining how tokenisation is actually used across the securities industry, with national regulators mapping firm usage, examining selected companies and assessing governance and client outcomes.
The European System of Central Banks, in its response to the Commission's MiCA review, wants the requirement that issuers park 30% to 60% of reserves in bank deposits dropped in favour of a liquidity rule based on how fast assets convert to cash, citing financial-stability concerns about bank-stablecoin linkage. It also backs a ban on multi-jurisdiction tokens, meaning a USDC issued in Europe would be a separate token from one issued in the US, and separately urges extending the yield prohibition to crypto lending, borrowing and staking.
Washington is reportedly considering joint ventures with private firms to promote dollar-backed stablecoins overseas, with the Treasury, State Department and Development Finance Corporation potentially involved, aimed at cementing dollar dominance and sourcing demand for Treasuries. This is policy positioning rather than an operational programme, and the IMF has warned wider stablecoin adoption could accelerate capital flight and weaken domestic currencies in emerging economies, a tension the plan does not resolve.
The ECB launched Pontes on 21 September, the Eurosystem's production solution for settling tokenised transactions in central bank money, with four DLT operators onboarded at launch, Axiology, Cashlink, Clearstream and the bank-backed SWIAT, three of them German plus Lithuania's licensed DLT Pilot Regime platform Axiology. Simultaneously the ECB committed to invest part of its own funds in tokenised euro-denominated securities from euro-area governments, agencies and supranationals, settled via Pontes, to gain first-hand experience across trade execution, settlement and portfolio management. The structural read is that central bank money is now available as a settlement asset for tokenised issuance in Europe, removing the constraint that has forced tokenised bonds to settle in commercial-bank money, and the ECB's move onto the buy side signals it wants tokenised markets to scale rather than merely observing them.
ClearToken received Bank of England Gate 2 approval to issue and settle tokenised securities under supervision, launching with FTSE 350 equities, GBP government debt and corporate bonds, with plans to expand to global equities, private funds and commodities. Its scope is broader than HSBC's July Gate 2 approval for digitally native bonds, and its 24/7 settlement enables intraday repo, letting counterparties borrow against collateral for hours rather than days.
The Clearing House selected Quant to provide the interoperability, orchestration and transaction-management layer for its On-Chain Money Initiative, enabling interbank payments across US banks' separate tokenised-deposit platforms via APIs, with a target launch in the first half of 2027. Housing the initiative at TCH is deliberate, since it already runs RTP and CHIPS, so the interbank settlement in central bank money can sit alongside the client-facing token movement, and it supports instant settlement and conditional payments.
The Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust added 15 members including Swift, Wells Fargo, Brazil's Fenasbac and Japan's DCJPY operator DCP, alongside a major upgrade to its Cacti interoperability platform that makes plugging in new chains easier for cross-chain transfers. Separately, Swift has started live trials of its Swift Ledger for interoperability and net settlement between banks or tokenised deposits, and Wells Fargo's planned proprietary tokenised-deposit platform appears to lean on LFDT technology.
MoonPay agreed to acquire North Capital in an all-stock deal reported above $60 million, adding a regulated securities stack including the PPEX ATS with more than 1,250 eligible securities and $8.7 billion in transaction volume, plus broker-dealer, transfer-agent and advisory registrations. North Capital co-founded Agora, the network connecting ATSs so institutional participants can route orders across venues, which raises a governance question now that one of Agora's two founding ATSs will belong to a vertically integrated group that also owns a router and payment rails.
NYSE Group signed Blockchain.com to explore distributing tokenised US stocks and ETFs to its 44 million account holders through NYSE's forthcoming digital ATS, following deals with OKX in March and tZERO in August. This deal is lighter on infrastructure than the OKX and tZERO agreements but adds a two-way data arrangement, with ICE Data Services distributing Blockchain.com's crypto market data and Blockchain.com integrating NYSE and ICE feeds into its app.
Bullish, Equiniti, Alpaca, Apex Fintech and DriveWealth launched the Issuer Sponsored Token Coalition to build standards tying tokenised shares to companies' official shareholder registers, preserving voting, dividend and corporate-action rights. The effort follows the SEC's 17 September innovation exemption, which drew the line between real tokens carrying full shareholder rights and synthetic price-tracking products, and it responds directly to the AMC-Robinhood dispute over whether wrapped tokens give holders genuine ownership.
The BCBS second-half 2025 statistics show bank prudential crypto exposures broadly flat, but a marked shift in composition, with Bitcoin's share of Americas exposures falling from 75.8% to 44.2% and Ether rising to 38.5%, and stablecoins gaining in the Rest of World category. Client-facing activity grew sharply, up 93% to EUR 6.4 billion in the Americas while European figures fell 25% to EUR 1.9 billion, though the reporting bank set varies each period.
Worth watching next
Whether the CMU’s tokenisation extensions can carry PBoC Renminbi Bills natively, and how quickly a DLT repo market forms around the new offshore RMB sovereign supply under Project EnsembleTX.
Which euro-area tokenised issuances settle first in central bank money via Pontes, and when the ECB moves from preparatory work to actual purchases of tokenised public-sector securities.
The Federal Reserve‘s 60-day comment window on its GENIUS Act proposals, and whether the OCC, FDIC and Fed converge or stay divergent on reserve caps and yield treatment.
Whether the Great British Tokenised Deposit group’s next phase, settling digital assets against tokenised customer money, proves the conditional-payment model beyond retail remortgages.
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