Itaú Unibanco and OpenAssets launch ANBIMA-run tokenised bonds and funds pilot

Itaú Unibanco, Latin America’s largest bank by assets with more than $562 billion on its balance sheet, has entered a tokenisation pilot alongside digital-asset infrastructure provider OpenAssets under the supervision of ANBIMA, Brazil’s financial and capital markets association. The pilot is designed to test the issuance, trading, and settlement of fixed-income securities and investment funds on distributed-ledger technology, and will also examine the regulatory and technical standards that banks and asset managers would need to adopt to operate such systems at scale.

The initiative is not Itaú’s first engagement with tokenisation. The bank was among institutions selected by Brazil’s central bank in 2023 to participate in the Drex pilot, which explored blockchain-based transactions involving tokenised money and assets. OpenAssets, for its part, raised $10 million to build tokenisation infrastructure in a round led by Valor Capital Group, with Tether and members of the Itaú Unibanco founding family among participating investors, a detail that illuminates how the partnership between the two firms took shape.

Brazil has accumulated a notable density of tokenisation activity across institution types and asset classes. VERT Capital announced plans to tokenise up to $1 billion of debt and receivables on the XDC Network in July 2025, Mercado Bitcoin outlined plans to tokenise $200 million in assets on the XRP Ledger, and farmers in Paraná have tokenised cattle through infrastructure connected to Brazil’s B3 exchange. The ANBIMA pilot adds a regulator-proximate, bank-grade layer to that ecosystem, which distinguishes it from purely commercial experiments and suggests the country is working to establish the standards infrastructure that a production-scale market would require.