Weekly briefing · Edition 24 · 19 October 2026 · covering 13 to 19 October
SFC approves six securities registrars for the uncertificated securities market regime
Edited by Cliffton Lee · Singapore · 25 items covered from 480 sources reviewed
Key points
BNY and Citadel Securities completed a transaction on 13 October 2026 moving tokenised US Treasuries from settlement into overnight triparty repo financing, with BNY settling the bond in minutes rather than on the standard T+1 cycle and committing to extend traditional settlement hours into European and Asian windows next year.
Hong Kong's SFC approved six securities registrars on 12 October 2026 for the upcoming uncertificated securities market regime, clearing the registrar layer that tokenised equity issuance depends on.
The European Banking Authority classified Circle's USDC as the first significant electronic money token under MiCA on 15 October 2026, triggering dual supervision by the EBA and France's ACPR, a 60% commercial-bank reserve floor, and a capital requirement rising from 2% to 3% of reserves.
Allium reported stablecoin payments reached $482 billion in the first nine months of 2026, up 45% year on year, even as circulating supply grew just 0.4% to about $305 billion by end-September, the same week Mastercard launched its BVNK-built Global Money Platform and Visa moved stablecoin prefunding into production.
The Council of the EU agreed on 10 October 2026 to raise the DLT Pilot Regime cap to EUR 300 billion per infrastructure with a path to EUR 500 billion, a fivefold jump over the Commission's EUR 100 billion proposal that ECB President Christine Lagarde publicly objected to on interoperability grounds.
That matters because collateral mobility, not issuance, is where tokenisation earns its keep for a funding desk, and BNY paired the demonstration with a commitment to extend conventional settlement hours into European and Asian windows next year. The custody and collateral story ran wide, with the EBA designating USDC the first significant EMT under MiCA and the EU Council voting to lift the DLT Pilot cap to EUR 300 billion over Lagarde's objection.
The SFC has approved 6 securities registrars for Hong Kong's incoming uncertificated securities market regime, clearing the registrar layer that any tokenised equity book-entry system has to sit on. This is the operational plumbing behind the May uncertificated-securities guidance, so a product team building a tokenised-share offering in Hong Kong now has named registrars to design against rather than a policy intention, and the sequencing puts Hong Kong ahead of Singapore on the equity-registry layer the way it already leads on tokenised bonds.
MAS has run 2 trial tokenised-bill issuances in a month, a S$1 million bill on 23 September maturing a week later and a S$10 million (USD 7.8 million) bill on 10 October maturing 23 October, both institutional-only and both settled against wholesale CBDC on the SGD testnet. The volumes and tenors mark these as capability trials rather than live funding, given standard MAS bills exceed S$10 billion, but Managing Director Chia Der Jiun framed the point as bringing tokenised assets and tokenised central bank money onto common infrastructure with settlement finality. If the programme sustains, these bills become a candidate backing asset for SGD stablecoins and a leg for intraday repo.
Three US systemics used their third-quarter earnings calls to set out distinct tokenisation strategies, with Wells Fargo saying its tokenised-deposit system already processes cross-border payments in 2 minutes or less, Goldman's David Solomon arguing tokenisation expands rather than cannibalises the trading franchise, and Morgan Stanley positioning it as fresh demand for wealth advice. None put a revenue figure on it, so the signal is strategic posture rather than disclosed economics, but a live sub-2-minute cross-border tokenised-deposit rail at Wells Fargo is an operational fact, not a pilot.
Mastercard's Global Money Platform, the first product from its $1.8 billion BVNK acquisition that closed in August, gives banks and fintechs a single API for accounts holding fiat and stablecoins side by side with conversion, stablecoin-linked cards, and payouts across more than 40 currencies into 2027, with named early customers including Nuvei, Marqeta and Ontop. Visa separately moved its Visa Direct stablecoin prefunding into production with Inyo Global as first enabler, confirming the two networks have diverged, Mastercard bundling fiat and stablecoin behind one integration and Visa layering standalone products onto existing rails.
Allium reported stablecoin payments reached $482 billion in the first nine months of 2026, up 45% year on year with transaction count up 71% to over 1 billion, even as circulating supply grew just 0.4% to about $305 billion by end-September. The read is velocity, not new issuance, with the dollars already in circulation turning over more often, and card-linked spending hit $3.9 billion through September, ten times a year earlier, with sub-$50 purchases driving 84% of the card increase.
The National Bank of Bahrain has signed an MoU with Partior, the DBS, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and Standard Chartered-backed settlement network, to explore becoming a Bahraini Dinar settlement bank, which would add both a currency and a jurisdiction to Partior's current USD, EUR and SGD footprint. Like the Emirates NBD arrangement this is exploratory rather than a firm commitment, covering operating model, technical feasibility and Bahrain's regulatory requirements, but it signals Partior is extending its multi-currency cross-border rail into the Gulf.
A BIS working paper using weekly US data from January 2019 to June 2025 finds stablecoins and bank deposits are partial substitutes, with a one-week one-basis-point rise in deposit rates cutting average ten-week stablecoin growth from about 15% to about 12%, and a stronger effect for USDC than USDT consistent with USDC's closer US ties. The authors flag that growth slows but does not reverse and that the sample covers one high-rate period, so the result is directional evidence that deposit pricing is a lever banks hold, not a mechanical dial.
ECB President Christine Lagarde told EU finance ministers on 10 October that a tokenised issuance is coming soon on Pontes, the Eurosystem service launched last month that settles tokenised transactions in central bank money across its own distributed ledger, with ESM Managing Director Pierre Gramegna having earlier said the crisis fund wanted to issue through it. She did not specify whether it will be a digital bond or a shorter instrument, so the detail is thin, but a regular euro-area issuer committing to tokenised issuance on live central-bank settlement rails turns Pontes from infrastructure into a market with supply.
Federated Hermes, a $912 billion asset manager, will distribute tokenised funds through conventional broker-dealers and advisers, with a first tokenised money-market fund expected in the first quarter of 2027 and the language suggesting Federated will issue the digital securities itself rather than have a third party mirror its shares. The target is the brokerage accounts where most Americans hold investments, a departure from the crypto-firm and institutional focus of most tokenised funds, though the announcement itself notes the obvious tension that idle-cash yield competes with one of the industry's biggest earners.
First Abu Dhabi Bank, the Middle East's largest bank, issued an AED 1 billion ($272 million) 3-year digital green bond at a 5.75% coupon on Euroclear's D-FMI platform, listed on ADX, its second digital bond after a $100 million issuance last July on HSBC's Orion platform. This is at least the fourth MENAT digital bond on D-FMI in a year and the third D-FMI issuance in two months, which reads as repeat institutional use of an established rail rather than a one-off experiment.
Iberdrola closed a EUR 150 million syndicated loan with BBVA and Santander administered entirely on an ioBuilders-built distributed ledger, with disbursement, interest, repayments, maturity and transfers of loan participations all running on a shared ledger rather than in each bank's separate systems. Syndicated loans are a long-standing target for shared ledgers given their fax-and-email administration, and several attempts since 2018 have had mixed results, so the live named-borrower deployment with interbank participation transfers is the detail that distinguishes this from earlier proofs of concept.
The European Banking Authority has designated Circle's USDC the first significant electronic money token under MiCA, putting Circle's French subsidiary under dual supervision by the EBA and France's ACPR, with the EBA taking own-funds, reserve-asset, liquidity and recovery-and-redemption oversight. Significant status raises the commercial-bank reserve floor from 30% to 60% and capital from 2% to 3% of reserves, a materially costlier regime for a dollar token that needs banks willing to take large USD deposits, though the ESCB is now consulting under MiCA 2 on replacing the bank-deposit floor with daily and weekly liquidity buckets.
The Council of the EU agreed its negotiating position on the market integration and supervision package on 10 October, lifting the DLT Pilot Regime cap to EUR 300 billion per infrastructure with a path to EUR 500 billion via delegated act, a fivefold jump over the Commission's EUR 100 billion proposal and far above the current EUR 6 billion. ECB President Lagarde objected to the EUR 300 billion figure and urged Parliament to revisit it, warning that DLT structures risk not being interoperable and could reintroduce fragmentation, while the Council also raised the cap for bank-group DLT settlement schemes from EUR 10 billion to EUR 50 billion.
Nine companies including Broadcom, Verizon and UnitedHealth have objected to having their shares traded on the OKX-ICE tokenised-stock venue planned under the SEC's five-year Innovation Exemption, and Nasdaq has separately said it would opt out, with a spokesperson citing the venue's failure to display best prices in real time or report to the consolidated tape. The exemption gives issuers 30 days to object, so the framework's viability depends on issuer participation, and early resistance from named large-caps narrows the tradable universe before the venue goes live.
Nasdaq-listed Perpetuals.com, led by former FTX Europe chief Patrick Gruhn, filed notice on 14 October to operate a tokenised-securities venue under the SEC's Innovation Exemption, the second applicant after the OKX-ICE joint venture, with trading possible from mid-November at the earliest subject to technical and compliance readiness. The exemption requires tokens to carry full shareholder rights including dividends and voting, so the competitive field for the exemption is now forming even as issuer objections surface against the first venue.
Qivalis, the euro stablecoin consortium backed by 37 European banks, has been authorised as an Electronic Money Institution by De Nederlandsche Bank, clearing the central regulatory hurdle for a euro EMT under MiCA with issuance planned within months, 13 months after the project's first announcement. It joins Quantoz, Fiat Republic and Aplauz as DNB-licensed euro issuers but is the first backed by a bank consortium, with Fireblocks providing infrastructure, a B2B2X distribution model, and former NatWest chairman Sir Howard Davies chairing the supervisory board as a governance signal aimed at institutional counterparties.
Payward, Kraken's parent, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Saldo Finance, whose Lithuanian-licensed Saldo Bank holds a CRD credit-institution licence with passporting across 5 markets, completing Payward's EU licensing stack with the one authorisation that allows deposit-taking and lending. The deal, expected to close in 2027, would be the first acquisition of an EU bank by a crypto exchange, and approval rests with the ECB under the Single Supervisory Mechanism, a body that has already flagged concern about banks' exposures to crypto-asset service providers.
Brazil's securities regulator published its DLT Pilot Program regulation, ruling out real transactions, assets and investors despite the pilot label, on an aggressive timeline requiring applications within 15 business days, roughly 5 November, with 60-day testing extendable by 30. Networks must be proposed by associations in the CVM's existing Tokenization Working Group, with ANBIMA, Ancord and Abrasca expected to host tests, and all participants must be CVM-regulated entities though the regulator can admit others in exceptional cases.
FSB Chair Andrew Bailey's letter to G20 finance ministers flagged vulnerabilities in global stablecoins, singling out multi-issuance arrangements including USDC and Paxos Global Dollar, warning that supervision, crisis management and cross-border cooperation remain underdeveloped and untested in severe stress or insolvency. The FSB wants wider adoption of its 2023 recommendations and deeper supervisor cooperation, noting that multi-issuance tokens rebalance reserves across jurisdictions to match redemptions, which means reserves can sit in one jurisdiction while redemption demand hits another during a crisis.
ESMA confirmed the EU switches to T+1 settlement on 11 October 2027 with the final RTS and guidelines now published, and set a first binding deadline of 7 December 2026 for investment firms to comply with mandatory electronic, standardised, machine-readable allocation and confirmation messaging. The framework is settled and the burden shifts to market participants to test across the trading and settlement chain, which tightens the window in which tokenised settlement's instant-finality advantage is measured against a compressing conventional cycle.
BNY and Citadel Securities completed what BNY calls the first use of tokenised collateral on a major triparty repo platform on 13 October, with Citadel buying a 2-year Treasury note on Tradeweb, BNY recording a tokenised representation on its private ledger, and the token used as collateral in an overnight triparty repo that settled in minutes rather than on T+1, with BNY acting as both triparty agent and cash lender. The structural point is collateral mobility, moving high-quality collateral from settlement into financing so firms can reuse it sooner, and BNY paired it with a commitment to extend conventional settlement hours for Fed-eligible securities and US triparty into European and Asian windows next year, which matters more for 24/7 markets than the single trade. The open question BNY does not answer is whether it needed a ledger to beat T+1 given it already clears around $24 trillion a day and launched intraday repo without tokens in early 2025.
BNY, the world's largest custodian with $62.6 trillion in assets under custody, has extended its digital-asset custody platform into the EU under MiCA, following its Belgian banking entity joining ESMA's register in July, with the platform supporting BTC, ETH, SOL and USDC and plans for a broader range. As a bank BNY needs no separate CASP licence, giving its national regulator 40 days' notice and using Fireblocks MPC technology and segregated client wallets, which puts a G-SIB custody wrapper around EU digital-asset holdings for institutional clients.
This is the same 13 October BNY-Citadel triparty repo, with the added detail that BNY sat as both triparty agent and cash lender rather than between a dealer and a third-party cash provider, and that the token may have been created as a receivable pending settlement. The sharper read is that BNY already settles Treasuries intraday and after hours without a blockchain and has been the only major US triparty agent since JPMorgan exited in 2019, so the interesting question is why it is bothering with tokens at all, and BNY offers two answers while a third it does not state may matter most.
Standard Chartered's Dubai branch now offers regulated institutional custody of Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin on the XRP Ledger, and the bank plans to let clients use RLUSD held in custody as trading collateral on LMAX without transferring it to the venue, subject to documentation, testing and approvals. The design separates custody from execution, the bank holding the tokens while the venue accepts their value, which appeals to institutions that want stablecoin trading exposure without leaving assets at a venue, and builds on Ripple's $150 million January financing to LMAX to integrate RLUSD.
Derivnex has launched what it calls an industry-first OTC swap on the Canton Network with DRW and Marex as named counterparties, a production deployment rather than a pilot on the privacy-focused institutional ledger. Named major-trader participation in a live OTC derivative is the detail that distinguishes this from a demonstration, and it extends Canton's footprint from collateral and repo use cases into bilateral derivatives.
Worth watching next
Whether BNY extends its tokenised-triparty and collateral-mobility work into live counterparty trades at scale, and whether the promised extension of settlement hours into European and Asian windows lands on schedule next year.
The Parliament trilogue on the DLT Pilot Regime cap, where Lagarde’s interoperability objection meets the Council’s EUR 300 billion position, and whether the EUR 500 billion delegated-act path survives.
Which three MiCA criteria the EBA relied on to designate USDC significant, and whether the MiCA 2 consultation replaces the 60% bank-deposit floor with liquidity buckets before the requirement bites.
How many more issuers opt out of the OKX-ICE tokenised-stock venue inside the 30-day window, and whether Perpetuals.com clears technical and compliance readiness to begin trading in mid-November.
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