Asia Takes Lead in Tokenized Finance Pilots
India and Singapore are taking tokenized finance projects live in pilot stages. In India, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) have launched a tokenized corporate bond pilot called 'Demat 2.0'. The pilot involves three companies issuing digital tokens on a distributed ledger owned by India's statutory depositories, with asset servicing handled automatically through smart contracts.
The RBI and SEBI stated that Demat 2.0 aims to reduce the cost of issuance and servicing for issuers, eliminate settlement risk, and enable interest and redemption payments in CBDCs. The project will be taken forward in phases, with secondary trading introduced later on.
Meanwhile, in Singapore, DBS, OCBC, and UOB have completed live domestic Singapore-dollar interbank transactions using tokenized deposits on Swift's blockchain-based ledger. This marks a significant milestone for Singapore's banking industry and demonstrates the potential of tokenized deposits in enabling efficient value movement via blockchain or DLT.