TREE NEWS update: India’s SEBI and the Reserve Bank of India launched a corporate bond tokenization pilot called “Demat 2.0,” bringing the roughly $620 billion Indian corporate bond market onto distributed ledger rails with settlement in the wholesale central bank digital currency, the digital rupee. The system links tokenized bonds to the RBI’s unified market interface for atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement and is expected to automate interest payments and redemptions via smart contracts. REC, Larsen & Toubro and IIFL Finance have issued tokenized bonds of 50 billion, 50 billion and 2.5 billion rupees respectively, totaling 102.5 billion rupees.
India Launches Tokenization Pilot for $620B Corporate Bond Market
This is a notable step because it pairs tokenized corporate debt with wholesale CBDC settlement, rather than treating tokenization as a standalone ledger exercise. Anchoring atomic delivery-versus-payment to the central bank's own market interface gives the pilot a real settlement spine, which is where most tokenization experiments stall. The open question is whether issuance broadens beyond these initial borrowers and whether smart-contract automation of coupons and redemptions holds up outside a pilot setting.
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