HSBC, Standard Chartered Complete First Live Tokenised Deposit Trade on Swift Ledger

As financial institutions worldwide explore blockchain technology, the rise of tokenized deposits and digital assets is confronting a fragmentation problem because their ledgers cannot communicate with one another. Swift, a hub for global cross-border settlement, has introduced a shared blockchain ledger designed to connect banks’ tokenized assets. The system aims to address the shutdown of cross-border payments on weekends and overnight by enabling instant transactions around the clock, marking an important step in financial digitization.

Swift said on July 9, 2026, that its shared blockchain ledger was ready after nine months of development and that it had launched a tokenized-deposit pilot with 17 financial institutions across six continents. Participants include HSBC, Citi, DBS, ANZ and Wells Fargo. The pilot allows banks to issue and transfer tokenized deposits on their own ledgers while testing instant cross-border transactions under existing compliance and risk-control standards, laying the groundwork for programmable money.

Swift is a cross-border financial messaging network connecting more than 11,500 financial institutions across over 200 countries and territories. Its shared ledger uses a unified coordination layer to link tokenized bank deposits and could eventually extend to CBDCs and regulated digital assets, reducing platform fragmentation and supporting round-the-clock cross-border payments.

Swift announced on March 30, 2026, that it had completed the design and moved into the minimum viable product stage, using Hyperledger Besu to build an EVM-compatible architecture. On July 9, it said the ledger was ready for initial use, with 17 banks across six continents—including Citi, HSBC and UBS—set to pilot live transactions. Final settlement will continue through existing systems, and no investment amount has been disclosed.