India, Singapore Launch Live Tokenized Finance Pilots

India’s securities regulator and central bank initiated a tokenized corporate bond pilot dubbed Demat 2.0. Three companies issued a combined 10.25 billion rupees, roughly $108 million, through this new market infrastructure. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) announced the pilot on September 9. Corporate bonds are now issued and held as digital tokens on a distributed ledger owned by India’s statutory depositories.

Asset servicing, including interest and redemption payments, is handled automatically via smart contracts. This Demat 2.0 infrastructure connects to India’s wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC), the digital rupee (e₹), through the Reserve Bank of India’s Unified Market Interface. That connection enables atomic settlement, where asset delivery and payment happen simultaneously, eliminating the conventional settlement window that can otherwise stretch up to three days.

Singapore’s Banks Move Tokenized Deposits Live

Meanwhile, Singapore’s three largest domestic banks, DBS, OCBC, and UOB, completed their first live domestic Singapore dollar interbank transactions using tokenized deposits on Swift’s blockchain based ledger.

A joint announcement from DBS on September 10 detailed the process. Payment messages were exchanged between banks using Swift’s ledger, recording obligations as tokenized deposit obligations on their respective infrastructures. This marks the first time these three banks have executed live interbank transactions with tokenized deposits, which are simply regular bank deposits represented in digital form to move value more efficiently across blockchain or DLT rails.

What’s Actually New Here

Regulators and financial institutions have explored blockchain and DLT for years to make issuance, settlement, and value movement faster. What’s different in these pilots is the depth of integration:

• Demat 2.0 automates manual servicing processes to cut issuance and administrative costs
• Atomic settlement eliminates settlement risk entirely, since payment and delivery can no longer happen out of sync
• Interest and redemption payments credit directly to bondholder wallets in CBDC, triggered automatically by smart contracts

SEBI and the Reserve Bank of India state these features make corporate bond issuance, settlement, and servicing faster and less error prone. They describe Demat 2.0 as the first system to combine native DLT issuance, statutory depository ownership, and CBDC settlement inside an existing regulated market, rather than as a sandbox running parallel to one.

Singapore’s move fits its broader ambition to become a regulated digital asset hub. Its 2024 launch of the Global Finance and Technology Network supports digital payments, tokenization, and digital assets more broadly.

The Issuers So Far

REC was the first issuer on September 7, raising 5 billion rupees ($52 million). L&T Limited and IIFL Finance followed on September 9, raising 5 billion rupees ($52 million) and 250 million rupees ($2.61 million) respectively. Tokenized corporate bond issuances continue in India, with future phases expected to add secondary trading and retail investor access.

Indian regulators say the experience gained from these live pilots will guide wider rollouts. Singapore’s collaboration with Swift, meanwhile, demonstrates how tokenized deposits could support 24/7 cross border payments, weekends included, something traditional correspondent banking has never managed to offer.

Hashlytics Take

The headline grouping these two pilots together is convenient, but they’re not solving the same problem. Singapore’s Swift trial is a plumbing upgrade, making existing bank deposits move faster between three institutions that already trusted each other. India’s Demat 2.0 is structurally different, since it ties tokenized bonds directly to a central bank digital currency inside a regulated depository system, which is a genuinely harder integration to pull off at a national level. If either pilot fails to scale past this initial phase, watch which one stalls. A Swift ledger hiccup is a technical fix. A CBDC settlement failure is a regulatory and monetary policy problem, and those don’t get patched overnight.