DBS Bank

What was announced

On 18 October 2024 DBS Bank said it was rolling out DBS Token Services for institutional clients. The suite has three parts: Treasury Tokens, for multi-currency intra-group transfers that run 24 hours a day without currency cut-off times; Conditional Payments, which release funds when conditions written into a smart contract are met; and Programmable Rewards, for digital vouchers. DBS named its work in Project Ubin, Project Orchid and Project Guardian, all run by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, as the groundwork.

How it works

DBS runs the services on its own Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible permissioned blockchain, connected to its core payment engine and to industry payment systems. DBS said the permissioned design gives it full control over the services. The tokens are DBS deposits, so the settlement asset is tokenised-deposit. Only DBS’s institutional clients can use them, so access is whitelisted. DBS has not said whether the on-chain token or the core banking record is the legal record, so the rubric takes the less open value, twin.

Record so far

The launch release reported client use before the rollout: a Treasury Tokens pilot with Ant International for intra-group transfers, a Conditional Payments pilot disbursing grants with Enterprise Singapore and the Singapore Fintech Association, and a DBS Hong Kong role in the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s e-HKD pilot. Several client deployments and an open-ended service give repeat and production at the first review.

DBS made no dated commitments at launch. Its 2025 annual report, published in March 2026, says DBS extended DBS Token Services to customers in Singapore and Hong Kong and describes tokenised deposits as a corporate client offering. On 5 September 2026 DBS and Citi’s New York office completed a weekend USD payment between Singapore and the United States using tokenised deposits over the Swift Digital Ledger. DBS’s release names DBS Treasury Tokens as the solution involved. This is recorded as an expansion because the service now reaches another bank over a shared ledger. On 10 September DBS, OCBC and UOB completed their first live domestic interbank transactions in Singapore dollars on the same ledger. Each bank recorded the obligations on its own tokenised-deposit infrastructure, and Swift’s ledger matched and netted them before final settlement through existing systems. The release does not name DBS Token Services, but it is the tokenised-deposit infrastructure DBS named for the Citi payment.

DBS has not published transaction volumes in any release or report found, which keeps scale at repeat.

For Ethereum

DBS chose the Ethereum execution environment on a private network, so smart contracts written for Ethereum can run on it, but no one outside DBS can hold the tokens or see the chain. The Citi and Singapore dollar payments went over Swift’s ledger, a separate shared ledger for which Swift built its prototype with Consensys, an Ethereum software company, and which enforces rules through smart contracts (Swift, September 2025). Swift has not named the chain, and how DBS’s chain connects to it is not described.

What to watch

Published volumes or client counts would move scale to sustained. A token issued on a public chain would be a pivot and would change the ledger value.