Weekly Brief No. 2 ·
Singapore's banks and India's depositories put tokenised money on ledgers they control
DBS, OCBC and UOB ran their first live Singapore dollar payments over Swift's blockchain ledger, and SEBI and the RBI launched tokenised corporate bonds on a depository-run ledger settled in wholesale CBDC. Both designs borrow from public-chain technology and keep the assets off public chains.
In the week of 7 September 2026 Singapore’s three largest banks completed their first live Singapore dollar payments over Swift’s blockchain-based ledger, days after DBS and Citi used it for a weekend US dollar payment. In Mumbai, SEBI and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) launched Demat 2.0, which puts corporate bonds on a ledger run by India’s depositories and settles them in wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC). India’s Financial Intelligence Unit also named 15 offshore crypto platforms, including token swap services, for operating without registration.
Swift’s ledger goes live in Singapore
On 7 September DBS said that it and Citi’s New York office had completed a US dollar payment between Singapore and the United States on Saturday 5 September, using tokenised deposits over Swift’s ledger. DBS says the payment took minutes, against an industry norm of up to two business days. On 10 September DBS, OCBC and UOB said they had completed the first live domestic interbank transactions in Singapore dollars using tokenised deposits on the same ledger.
Both releases describe the same mechanism. Each bank records the payment as a tokenised deposit on its own ledger. Swift’s ledger acts as an “orchestration layer”: it matches the banks’ obligations to each other and nets them. Final settlement then runs through existing systems. The tokens never leave the banks’ own books, and the interbank settlement still happens in the conventional way, later.
Swift said in July that the ledger was ready for initial use, with 17 banks preparing live pilots, among them DBS, OCBC, UOB, HSBC, Standard Chartered and MUFG. UOB and HSBC had already run Hong Kong dollar transactions on it in August.
The Ethereum connection is in how the ledger was built. When Swift announced the ledger in September 2025, it said Consensys, an Ethereum software company, would build the conceptual prototype, and that the ledger would “record, sequence and validate transactions and enforce rules through smart contracts”. The same release said Swift would orchestrate between “both private and public networks”. Swift’s releases do not name the chain the ledger runs on, and access is limited to participating banks.
This matters for Ethereum in two ways. The banks are using Ethereum-derived technology, smart contracts and a shared ordered ledger, for money that stays inside the regulated perimeter. And nothing in these transactions touches a public chain: no token is issued on Ethereum, and no public-chain asset settles against the deposits.
I read Swift’s ledger as a bridge. Swift built it on smart contracts, from a prototype by an Ethereum software company, and said at launch that it would orchestrate between private and public networks (Swift, September 2025). That makes it the shortest route for tokenised deposits in Singapore to settle, later, against tokenised assets on public chains, without each bank connecting to those chains itself. No such transaction has been announced and the ledger is not public, so this is a reading of the design, not of anything Swift has done yet. The test is whether Swift names the ledger’s chain, or runs a first transaction that settles against an asset on a public network.
Regulation
India, tokenised bonds. SEBI and the RBI launched Demat 2.0 on 10 September at the Global Fintech Fest. Corporate bonds are issued as tokens on a distributed ledger owned by the depositories, and the cash leg settles in wholesale CBDC through the RBI’s Unified Markets Interface, so bond and cash move at the same moment. REC, L&T and IIFL issued tokenised bonds worth Rs 1,025 crore between 7 and 9 September. Later phases add secondary trading on request-for-quote platforms and retail access. The Wire item has the detail.
Demat 2.0 and Swift’s ledger make the same choice from opposite directions. India kept the bond inside its statutory depositories and changed the settlement money. Singapore’s banks kept their deposits on their own books and added a shared layer between them. Neither uses a public chain.
India, crypto registration. On 9 September the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU-IND) issued notices under section 13 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act to 15 crypto service providers operating in India without registering, and sought takedown of their apps and websites. The list names exchanges and also instant swap services such as ChangeNow, SimpleSwap and FixedFloat. A service that swaps one token for another now clearly needs to register with FIU-IND to serve Indian users (Wire item).
Pilots
- Demat 2.0 joins the Pilot Scorecard, with three issuers in its first week.
- DBS Token Services records the DBS and Citi weekend payment as an expansion.
Technology
On 7 September the Ethereum Foundation’s protocol team set its priorities: Ethereum’s base layer should be quantum-resistant across execution, consensus and data by December 2029, with research on fast finality, privacy, state management and zkEVMs organised around that goal. The same day it published its view of the candidate changes for Hegota, the upgrade after Glamsterdam. Neither post mentions institutional use. For a bank or fund that issues a long-dated instrument on Ethereum mainnet, the 2029 target sets the horizon on which the chain’s signature schemes are expected to change.
On the site
- Regulatory Wire: FIU-IND issues non-compliance notices to 15 offshore crypto platforms (9 September).
- Regulatory Wire: SEBI and RBI launch Demat 2.0 (10 September).
- Pilot Scorecard: SEBI Demat 2.0 tokenised corporate bonds, new.