Overview
Recent tokenization projects are giving authorities and market participants a more practical evidence base for assessing how tokenized assets, tokenized money and DLT-based infrastructure could reshape wholesale payments and capital markets. Across recent initiatives such as Project Acacia, Project Agora, Pontes, Appia and Canada's Project Tokenization, the focus is moving beyond general opportunity assessment toward concrete questions of settlement design, interoperability, legal certainty, governance and regulatory adaptation. These projects commonly examine whether tokenization can support faster and more automated settlement, reduced reconciliation and counterparty risk, improved lifecycle management, greater programmability and more efficient use of collateral and liquidity. At the same time, they underline that wider adoption will depend on resolving persistent implementation challenges, including how tokenized markets connect with existing infrastructure, what forms of central bank and private money should support settlement, how settlement finality and custody should be treated, and how supervisors should address risks linked to smart contracts, wallets, bridges, market surveillance and cross-border activity.
Complementing the project work, authorities are also supporting the build-out of the tokenization ecosystem and testing of real-world use cases through targeted market development initiatives and testing initiatives under their existing innovation hub and regulatory sandbox infrastructures.
What's new
The International Swaps and Derivatives Association is developing a proof of concept for exchanging tokenized collateral under its documentation, including potential updates to credit support documents and legal opinions. The work is intended to enable continuous margin movement for 24/7 trading, but requires regulatory and legal clarity on custody, capital treatment and cross-border recognition.
The European Central Bank is preparing to invest a small portion of its own funds in tokenised securities, with settlement in central bank money through Pontes. Initial purchases will target euro-denominated public sector and European supranational securities. The Executive Board will determine operational details and timing after the preparatory work.
The Brazil Securities Commission’s Tokenization Working Group submitted a draft resolution proposing a DLT pilot covering the securities lifecycle from issuance through settlement. The tests would assess the technology’s viability, interoperability and risks under direct CVM monitoring. They would run for 60 days, extendable by up to 30 days, and inform possible regulatory or legislative changes.
Deep dive
Project Acacia
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) conducted Project Acacia to examine how asset tokenisation, digital money and associated settlement infrastructure could improve the efficiency, functionality and resilience of Australia’s wholesale financial markets. Industry participants tested 20 use cases covering multiple asset classes and stages of the asset lifecycle, using settlement arrangements involving existing exchange settlement account balances, a pilot wholesale CBDC, tokenised commercial bank deposits and stablecoins.
StatusProject progress and key milestones
The experimental phase has been completed, with the final report published in May. The RBA, DFCRC and other Australian authorities are now taking the work forward through a multi-stream programme covering a possible digital financial market infrastructure sandbox, tokenised government bonds, interoperable deposit tokens, potential adaptations to RBA settlement infrastructure and further wholesale CBDC research.
ResultsKey project outcomes
The project found that tokenisation could support faster settlement, lower counterparty and operational risk, improved capital efficiency and greater automation of asset issuance and servicing. It also demonstrated the technical feasibility of issuing pilot wholesale CBDC on both public and private DLT platforms and found that synchronisation with existing central bank settlement infrastructure could provide many similar benefits. Wider adoption will nevertheless require stronger interoperability, industry coordination and legal and regulatory clarity, while central bank money is expected to remain the anchor of the two-tier monetary system.
Project Agorá
The BIS Innovation Hub and the Institute of International Finance established Project Agorá to test the desirability, feasibility and viability of a multi-currency shared programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments. The platform combines tokenised central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits with the objective of enabling atomic settlement, reducing sequential processing and reconciliation, and making international payments faster, safer and more transparent without undermining the safety and reliability of the existing banking system.
StatusProject progress and key milestones
The initial prototype and exploratory phase has been completed, and the findings were published in May 2026. The project is now progressing towards further testing, including selected real-value transactions, with the Bank of Canada joining the next phase and participation expanding to eight central banks and more than 40 financial institutions. The prototype is intended as an experimental basis for further development rather than as a finished production system.
ResultsKey project outcomes
The prototype demonstrated that atomic settlement of wholesale transactions using tokenised central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits is technically achievable across multiple currencies and jurisdictions. It also showed that a layered architecture can preserve individual central banks’ autonomy, privacy can be protected at both balance and transaction levels, and tokenisation need not alter the legal character of the underlying money. Legal analysis found that settlement finality could be achieved in the seven original participating jurisdictions, although further work is required on technical and contractual arrangements, governance, cybersecurity, liquidity management, financial-crime controls and data sharing.
Project Pontes
The Eurosystem is developing Pontes as its near-term operational solution for connecting market DLT platforms with TARGET Services and settling tokenised wholesale transactions in central bank money. It will provide a single Eurosystem offering with a dual settlement model—using cash tokens on a Eurosystem DLT platform or settlement through the T2 real-time gross settlement system—and will use interoperability mechanisms to support synchronised delivery-versus-payment and other all-or-none transactions.
StatusProject progress and key milestones
Pontes is in implementation, testing and participant-onboarding preparation. Eurosystem acceptance testing entered its functional phase in June 2026, with national central bank testing scheduled from July and market-user testing from August; the initial pilot launch remains planned for September 2026, followed by incremental enhancements and further onboarding.
ResultsKey project outcomes
Not yet available
Project Appia
The Eurosystem is conducting Appia as its longer-term strategic initiative for shaping an integrated, innovative and resilient European tokenised wholesale financial ecosystem in which central bank money remains the monetary anchor. Its work covers interoperability and common asset standards, monetary policy and collateral management on DLT, infrastructure for tokenised central bank money, cross-border interoperability, financial stability and legal and regulatory arrangements, and the implementation implications for existing market infrastructures.
StatusProject progress and key milestones
Appia remains in its analytical, consultation and stakeholder-engagement phase. The Eurosystem published the Appia roadmap in March 2026, received responses from 126 stakeholders and invited applications for a joint Appia and Pontes contact group through 19 June 2026; consultation responses are expected to be published in the second half of 2026. The work is intended to inform staged enhancements to Pontes and culminate in a blueprint for the future ecosystem in 2028.
ResultsKey project outcomes
Not yet available
Project Tokenization
The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) launched Project Tokenization through the CSA Collaboratory to examine how tokenized financial products and distributed-ledger-based market models interact with Canadian securities laws. The project is intended to build a shared regulatory understanding of the opportunities, risks and market implications of tokenization, support coordinated regulatory responses and promote capital-market competitiveness while maintaining investor protection and market integrity. Its scope includes product structures and retail access, trading and settlement, custody and market infrastructure, DeFi integration, interoperability with traditional systems, cross-chain connectivity and related legal and regulatory questions.
StatusProject progress and key milestones
Project Tokenization remains in its initial stakeholder-engagement, issue mapping and research phase. Participating regulators include the Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Québec securities regulators. The CSA held an initial workshop in Calgary in April and a second workshop in Toronto in June, which sought practical input on potential use cases, efficiency and cost benefits, legal uncertainties, frictions with existing securities requirements and areas where regulatory guidance may be needed.
ResultsKey project outcomes
Not yet available
Project Samara
Project Samara was a Canadian public-private experiment led by the Bank of Canada, Export Development Canada (EDC), RBC Capital Markets, RBC Investor Services and TD Bank Group to assess how tokenization and distributed ledger technology could improve bond issuance, settlement and life-cycle management in a real-world capital markets setting. The project involved EDC issuing Canada’s first tokenized bond using DLT, with payments settled in wholesale central bank deposits, through a purpose-built Samara Platform based on Hyperledger Fabric. The platform integrated separate bond and cash ledgers and was designed to support end-to-end functions including cash and bond issuance, bidding, coupon payment, redemption, secondary trading and instant on-chain settlement.
StatusProject progress and key milestones
Project Samara has been completed as a limited experiment. The Bank of Canada announced completion on 5 March 2026, following the issuance of a single CAD 100 million bond with a maturity of less than three months to a closed investor group. The experiment was not a full commercial launch: CIRO’s related InnovateSafe undertaking restricted participation to the internal treasury functions of the approved dealer members or affiliated banks, required the tokenized bonds and W-CAD to remain within a closed-loop permissioned blockchain environment, and stated that any further use or operation of the platform would require CIRO approval.
ResultsKey project outcomes
Project Samara found that DLT-based issuance and settlement of real financial instruments is technically feasible and can improve operational efficiency, workflow automation, data integrity and settlement speed, while reducing counterparty and settlement risk through atomic delivery-versus-payment. These benefits were partly offset by system complexity, pre-funding and liquidity costs, the need for new governance arrangements, operational risks around technology, key management, auditability and fallback mechanisms, and legal and regulatory frictions arising from the need to map decentralized ledger design onto existing centralized roles such as marketplace operator, custodian, official register and trade-reporting infrastructure. The project therefore provides a useful basis for future Canadian work on tokenized capital markets infrastructure, but its findings remain preliminary given its narrow scope, closed participant group and single-security design.
Other market development activities
Complementary market development initiatives are emerging alongside project-based experimentation as authorities seek to build the institutional, regulatory and operational conditions needed for tokenised markets to scale. These initiatives are generally focused on broader ecosystem development, including industry coordination, market standards, practical implementation tools, sandbox access, legal and regulatory clarification, and the testing of targeted use case.
01Monetary Authority of Singapore
The Monetary Authority of Singapore has announced plans for the establishment of a Future of Finance Institute to accelerate the adoption of new financial technologies and move the sector from experimentation to broader deployment. The institute will initially focus on artificial intelligence and tokenization and provide four core capabilities: (1) A knowledge hub, (2) an innovation garage, (3) an industry sandbox, (4) implementation toolkits including a programmable compliance toolkit for tokenised assets.
02Hong Kong Monetary Authority
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has set up a Tokenised Bond Expert Group to support broader use of tokenised bonds in Hong Kong. The group brings together industry associations, financial institutions, legal advisory firms, and financial infrastructure and technology providers to examine policy measures, market practices, and innovation measures. Initial discussions focused on the legal and regulatory regime and how it applies to tokenised bond issuance and transactions.
03Bank Negara Malaysia
Bank Negara Malaysia has onboarded three initiatives for 2026 testing of real-world applications involving ringgit stablecoins and tokenised deposits under its Digital Asset Innovation Hub. The work will focus on wholesale payment use cases for domestic and cross-border transactions, including enabling settlement of tokenised assets, to help the central bank assess monetary and financial stability implications and shape policy direction.
04Bank Negara Malaysia
Bank Negara Malaysia has established an Asset Tokenisation Industry Working Group as the inaugural initiative under its Digital Asset Innovation Hub to support collective industry exploration of tokenised financial services. The IWG brings together financial service providers, with BNM chairing the initial phase and the Securities Commission Malaysia serving as a key partner, to identify use cases with tangible economic benefits, build operational, technological and risk-management capabilities, support alignment on emerging standards such as interoperability, and assess potential monetary and financial stability risks, regulatory gaps and legal impediments.
05Bank of France & Others
French authorities and the Treasury have launched a strategic market-wide group to identify concrete projects and accelerate adoption of distributed ledger technology in financial markets. Its work will inter alia cover private tokenised settlement assets and their interaction with an interbank wholesale central bank digital currency, tokenisation of financial instruments, industrial models for DLT-based market infrastructures, and the development of tokenised funds.
06Qatar Financial Centre
The Qatar Financial Centre has signed memoranda of understanding with multiple local banks to collaborate on fintech innovation and digital asset, including in relation to tokenization. Planned efforts include development and testing of tokenisation use cases through the Qatar Financial Centre's Digital Assets Lab alongside broader knowledge sharing initiatives, capacity building and active industry engagement.