Weekly briefing · Edition 23 · 5 October 2026 · covering 29 September to 5 October
Korea's FSC publishes draft tokenisation rules with a February force date
Edited by Cliffton Lee · Singapore · 23 items covered from 499 sources reviewed
Key points
Oracle, IBM and Cosmos each announced integrations with Swift's blockchain-based Ledger within a week, a vendor rush to a platform that only went live in July 2026 and remains in pilot with 17 banks for tokenised deposits through year-end.
The Hong Kong government issued its fourth digital green bond at around HKD 20 billion ($2.55 billion) on 2 October 2026, the largest digital bond globally, and for the first time settled the HKD tranche via tokenised deposits on EnsembleTX alongside tokenised central bank money and traditional rails.
Korea's FSC published draft tokenisation rules on 2 October 2026, open for comment until 11 November and scheduled to take force on 4 February 2027, requiring every electronic-registration ledger to include the Korea Securities Depository plus at least two account-management entities.
Seven institutions including Barclays and Wells Fargo joined BIS Project Agorá, taking the private-sector group near 50 members, with five of Canada's big six now participating a week after they announced a joint Canadian-dollar tokenised deposit initiative.
Open USD went live on 30 September 2026 across Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tempo with $468 million initial market capitalisation, more than 200 partners, and Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa as founding investors.
Happy National Foundation Day to readers in South Korea. Week ending 5 October 2026, covering 29 September to 5 October 2026. The most material development is the vendor rush to Swift's Ledger, with Oracle, IBM and Cosmos each announcing integrations within a single week to a platform that went live only in July 2026 and is still in pilot with 17 banks for tokenised deposits through year-end. Vendors rarely build connectivity to settlement infrastructure on speculation, so the clustering reads as evidence that banks are already asking for the bridge between their own tokenised-deposit systems and Swift's shared commitment ledger. The settlement-layer story ran wide this week, with Hong Kong adding tokenised deposits to its $2.55 billion digital green bond, seven banks joining Project Agorá, and Korea publishing enforceable tokenisation rules with a February force date.
The Financial Services Commission released draft rules governing tokenised securities and fractional-investment instruments on 2 October, open for comment until 11 November and scheduled to come into force on 4 February 2027, subject to FSC resolution and cabinet approval. The load-bearing constraint for any product team is the ledger-participant rule, where each electronic-registration ledger must include the Korea Securities Depository plus at least 2 account-management entities, and directly charging a fee for ledger use is prohibited since the register is treated as public infrastructure.
The government's fourth digital green bond landed at around HKD 20 billion ($2.55 billion) on 2 October, the largest digital bond globally, spanning four currencies with an RMB tranche the largest and oversubscribed across all tranches at 1.3 to 11.3 times. The structural step is settlement optionality, with the HKD tranche now settleable via tokenised deposits on EnsembleTX, tokenised central bank money introduced in the prior issuance, or traditional rails, all on the HSBC Orion platform integrated with the Central Moneymarkets Unit.
The HKMA confirmed on 30 September that Bank of China (Hong Kong), HSBC and Standard Chartered completed credit approvals for 7 pilot cases under the IP Financing Sandbox, with loans from HK$1 million to HK$39 million across electronics, construction, toy manufacturing and medical devices. Banks incorporated independent IP valuation reports into credit assessment, offering higher loan amounts or better rates on patent and trademark collateral, which is the practical groundwork for treating intangible assets as a financeable, and eventually tokenisable, collateral class.
Within a single week, Oracle, IBM and Cosmos each announced integrations with Swift's blockchain-based Ledger, unusual for a platform live only since July 2026 and still in pilot with 17 banks using it for tokenised deposits through year-end. The Ledger does not move money, since tokenised deposits stay on each bank's own system while Swift's shared ledger records and nets the payment commitments banks make to one another, and the vendors are building the bridge between bank systems and that ledger. Oracle is the most natural fit given its existing tokenised-deposit infrastructure, extending the position by hosting Swift's commitment contracts and linking tokenised flows to its Banking Payments product so traditional and tokenised transactions run through one operating model.
Open USD launched on 30 September across Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tempo with $468 million initial market capitalisation, 3 months after unveiling with 140 partners and now past 200, including 52 banks, with Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa as founding investors. The distinguishing feature is the economic model, where the overwhelming majority of reserve earnings and equity will be distributed over time to partners based on how much they grow supply and transaction activity, rather than concentrated with a single issuer. BlackRock, BNY and Lead Bank hold the reserves, and Zach Abrams has stepped down as CEO of Stripe-owned Bridge to run the Open Standard full time.
Citi will provide banking services to Coinbase clients through its Virtual Account Wallet, giving each customer their own bank routing details with the aim of automatically converting incoming fiat to stablecoins, and will add stablecoin payment support via Spring, Citi's acceptance product. The notable part is the counterparty, since fintechs usually partner with specialty sponsor banks rather than a G-SIB, and a Coinbase subsidiary holds only conditional trust-charter approval without a Federal Reserve account, so it cannot provide deposit services itself.
BNY launched a pay-to-wallet solution letting banks send cross-border payments directly to retail digital wallets, extending a major custodian's cross-border capability toward the wallet endpoint. The operational read is that BNY is building out the last-mile rail for bank-originated cross-border flows rather than leaving it to fintech intermediaries.
BlackRock developed three portfolios for Ondo Finance's Intelligent Portfolios, combining assets into high-income, diversified-growth and high-growth strategies that an investor holds as a single token rather than buying and rebalancing the underlying positions separately. The shift is from tokenising individual securities to tokenising the strategy itself, which can move between wallets, be visible onchain and potentially serve as collateral, against a model-portfolio market Broadridge sized at about $9.8 trillion in assets in June 2026.
DTCC announced a collaboration and undisclosed investment in iCapital to streamline private-markets workflows and partner on DLT and tokenisation, with iCapital's DLT-based workflow already adopted by Morgan Stanley Wealth Management and integrated by UMB Fund Services. DTCC will integrate its Alternative Investment Product offering further with iCapital's infrastructure, splitting the work with iCapital on front and middle office and DTCC on post-trade.
WisdomTree's tokenised fund assets surpassed $1.2 billion as of 29 September 2026, up from about $770 million at the start of 2026, across 15 SEC-registered funds on 8 public blockchains, and it consolidated the lineup under WisdomTree Onchain. The operational detail that matters is 24/7 secondary-market liquidity for its Treasury Money Market Digital Fund through WisdomTree Securities acting as principal dealer, subject to inventory, which is a structural step beyond primary issue-and-redeem.
Franklin Templeton's tokenised money-market shares, representing about $686 million in net assets and currently paying roughly 3.7% annualised, can now be pledged on Bybit as collateral for USDT or USDC credit lines while earning yield, with the underlying held off-exchange via ByCustody and mirrored into the trading environment. This extends an off-exchange collateral programme already running on Binance and OKX, building out collateral mirroring across the major exchanges.
CSD BR is tokenising BTG Pactual fund-share records on the public XRP Ledger with Ripple, moving from testing to live operation, though fund shares are a small part of its business. Each token mirrors CSD BR's official records, which remain the legal source of ownership, and no new regulatory approval was needed since participants' legal responsibilities are unchanged.
The SEC published a 760-page proposed rule on 2 October giving investment advisers and funds a compliant custody pathway, expanding qualified-custodian status to state-chartered trust companies for crypto assets, and allowing narrow adviser self-custody only where no qualified custodian is available, reviewed quarterly. The timing lands as DTCC readies tokenised securities, which count as crypto assets under the proposal, so the rules cover tokenised securities, stablecoins and tokenised deposits, and may reach newly issued digitally native tokens under investment contracts.
Treasury issued interim procedural rules on 30 September for the state stablecoin certification process on behalf of the Stablecoin Certification Review Committee, setting application forms and review steps, though certifications will not be accepted until paperwork approvals complete. The more consequential substantial-similarity criteria, proposed in April and already drawing state pushback, remain only a proposal, and with no federal regulator having finalised its GENIUS rules, state regulators face concern that the one-year certification window closing 18 January 2028 will arrive before they can comply.
In response to the European Commission's May consultation on updating MiCA, AFME argued strongly against bringing DLT-based financial instruments under MiCA, warning of legal uncertainty, cost and damage to liquidity, hedging and collateral eligibility, and the EBA echoed the stance while raising whether asset-referenced tokens should fold into the definition of financial instrument. AFME also backed multi-issuance stablecoins, sought changes to stablecoin concentration limits, and asked for confirmation that tokenised deposits sit under the existing banking framework.
ESMA's response to the Commission's MiCA review proposes stricter marketing rules including for influencer promotion, proportionate requirements for staking, lending and borrowing, reinforced powers to block fraudulent sites and freeze assets, and a bar on regulated firms offering services linked to non-compliant stablecoins. It also advocates clearer criteria for genuine decentralisation and a new regulated service for firms providing access to DeFi protocols.
Commentary from Promethum's founder sharpens how the SEC's 17 September innovation exemption draws the line, excluding synthetic price-tracking wrappers that give holders no ownership and passing only real tokens that carry full shareholder rights. The argument is that synthetic wrappers, such as the offshore debt securities at the centre of the AMC-Robinhood dispute, route trading offshore and never reach US capital markets beyond the issuer's initial collateral purchase.
Cboe and S&P Dow Jones Indices extended their exclusive S&P 500 options licence through 2051 and included a clause that they may collaborate on products such as tokenised options contracts, against a market where SPX options traded a record 970.6 million contracts in 2025. No product, timeline or mechanism was announced, so this is optionality written into a routine renewal rather than a committed build.
Barclays, BMO, CIBC, Rabobank, RBC, Scotiabank and Wells Fargo joined Project Agorá, the BIS-led initiative for a shared platform for tokenised deposits and central bank reserves, taking it to 8 central banks and a private-sector group approaching 50 institutions. The Canadian surge is the standout, with 5 of the big six now in, a week after those banks announced a joint Canadian-dollar tokenised deposit initiative, and Agorá gives that domestic project a cross-border path from tokenised deposits to international settlement in tokenised central bank reserves.
The Clearing House CEO David Watson set out a two-track initiative, one built with Quant launching in the first half of 2027 and a second Layer 2 blockchain with no vendor or date yet, designed as interoperability between individual bank tokenised-deposit platforms rather than a shared token. Watson's framing is coexistence, with technology choosing the optimal rail per transaction, so the cash leg of a DvP (delivery-versus-payment) securities settlement, a PvP (payment-versus-payment) treasury payment and an international P2P transfer each route differently.
Goldman Sachs is deploying a $100 billion Treasury fund onto tokenisation infrastructure, a scale signal for institutional adoption, though execution details and live flows remain unclear from the announcement. The usual discount applies until the settlement mechanics and counterparties are disclosed.
A commissioned report found almost 30% of institutional blockchain platforms run on Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust technologies, with Hyperledger Fabric and Besu in the top three, including Project Agorá, the Eurosystem's Pontes, all three of the largest CSDs Clearstream, DTCC and Euroclear, and three of the top five G-SIBs. The report's own authors note the 29.4% figure likely understates reality, since over a quarter of projects disclosed no technology and some EVM-compatible deployments almost certainly use Besu.
Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok argued that agentic AI assistants could trigger a slow-motion bank run by automatically sweeping household cash from checking accounts paying a 0.1% average into alternatives paying 3.3% to 5%, draining the cheap deposits banks rely on to fund lending. He names the crypto payment rails, including Coinbase's x402, as the infrastructure such agents would use, placing tokenised money and agentic finance at the centre of a systemic-risk question.
Worth watching next
Whether more banks and vendors wire into Swift’s Ledger before the 17-bank tokenised-deposit pilot closes at year-end, and whether any move from pilot to production pricing.
Korea’s FSC comment window closing 11 November, and whether the KSD ledger-participant and no-fee requirements are softened before the 4 February 2027 force date.
Whether the SEC finalises its 760-page custody proposal in time for DTCC‘s tokenised-securities launch, and how qualified-custodian status for state trust companies is used in practice.
Whether Open USD’s share-the-economics model pulls distribution partners away from USDT and USDC, and where its market capitalisation sits by year-end against the $468 million launch.
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