The infrastructure shift: Why tokenised bonds matter now

Settlement infrastructure is the least visible part of any capital market, and the part that determines how much friction sits between an investor and their return. I built CoinDCX on a conviction I have held since 2016, when blockchain was still dismissed by most of Indian finance as a curiosity: that distributed ledgers would eventually underpin the infrastructure of mainstream markets, not sit beside it as an alternative. It has taken a decade for that conviction to show up inside the Reserve Bank of India's actual market infrastructure, which is precisely why this week matters. The Reserve Bank of India and SEBI launched Demat 2.0, a pilot that tokenises corporate bonds and settles them using central bank digital currency and blockchain rails. Read narrowly, it is a technology trial. Read correctly, it is India positioning itself inside a structural shift already underway in the world's deepest capital markets.

Tokenisation, at its core, is a simple idea executed at scale. Traditional instruments- bonds, fund shares, deposits- are issued as programmable tokens on a distributed ledger. Ownership, transfer rules, and corporate actions get embedded directly into code. That reduces reconciliation cost, compresses settlement cycles, and removes layers of manual processing that have sat, largely unquestioned, inside fixed income operations for decades.

The scale of this shift in the United States is no longer theoretical. Total on-chain value of tokenised real-world assets, excluding stablecoins, reached roughly USD 33.5 billion by mid-2026, close to four times where it stood at the start of 2025. Tokenised US Treasuries account for the largest share of that figure, surpassing USD 15 billion in May 2026, up from under USD 1 billion at the start of 2024. BlackRock's BUIDL fund alone carries a market cap above USD 2.4 billion. Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs have each moved from pilot programs to production infrastructure over the same period. The SEC has been equally clear on the boundary that does not move: putting a security on a blockchain does not change its legal status. Tokenisation upgrades settlement and servicing. It does not create a shortcut around regulation, and no serious market participant is treating it as one.


India's approach reflects a similar discipline. Demat 2.0 launched with three bond issuances, anchored by a Rs 500 crore offering from Larsen & Toubro, drawing participation from SBI, Axis Bank, and SBI Mutual Fund. The pilot runs through CDSL, NSDL, the exchanges, and major banks, the same institutions that already record bond ownership today. Keeping them at the centre of the pilot is what preserves legal certainty over who owns what, even as the settlement layer underneath changes. RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra framed this as part of a broader ambition: India becoming a trusted partner in shaping the future architecture of global finance, building on the credibility earned through UPI and now the Unified Lending Interface.

The practical implication for investors is access. Fractionalising a bond that once required a Rs 10 lakh ticket into units worth Rs 100 does more than democratise participation. It deepens liquidity, tightens price discovery, and gives retail investors exposure to instruments that were previously the preserve of institutions.

Where this goes next is predictable. Bonds are the proving ground. Equity and mutual funds are the natural next candidates for extension, and gold tokenisation is already under active exploration by the RBI, according to RBI Executive Director P. Vasudevan. Commercial papers and certificates of deposit are trading in tokenised form today. The pattern is consistent across markets: fixed income leads, other asset classes follow once settlement infrastructure and legal frameworks mature.

The institutions that treat tokenisation as core infrastructure, not a side experiment, will define the next decade of market structure. That has been the founding premise of my work in this industry since long before it entered the vocabulary of central banks and global asset managers. India has just placed its marker. The rest of the world is watching closely, and should be.

• By Rohit Jain, Chief Strategy & Investment Officer - CoinDCX

Name: Sharjil Shaikh

Contact details: sharjil.shaikh@coindcx.com

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References:

• Total tokenized RWAs of about $33.5B
• Tokenized US Treasuries above $15B in May 2026
• $1B in early 2024
• BlackRock BUIDL above $2.4B
• Franklin Templeton
• JP Morgan
• Asset Tokenization
• RBI Executive Director P. Vasudevan