Every argument for tokenization is an argument about who holds the authoritative record. That is your business. The question is whether the tokenized instrument settles through you, or around you.
A depository's power comes from being the single place the record lives. A shared ledger offers the same property — which makes it either the biggest threat to your mandate or the largest expansion of it.
A material share of post-trade cost exists because ledgers disagree. Infrastructure that removes disagreement removes cost — and some of that cost is your income.
Whether you may hold, settle or register a tokenized instrument is usually unresolved in your governing statute. That is the first thing to fix.
Anchoring a hash of your register to a chain is cheap and changes little. Making the on-chain record the authoritative one changes everything — including your legal exposure. Most programmes never make this choice explicitly.
A tokenized instrument has to settle against cash, meet your existing DvP model, and appear correctly in participants' books. Parallel rails are a migration problem, not a launch problem.
Your participants' operations, not your architecture, will set the pace. Any design that requires them all to change at once will not launch.
Highlighted steps are the ones we carry end to end. Durations are indicative for a first asset; each subsequent asset in the same class reuses most of the work.
Decide what you want to be in a tokenized market — registrar, settlement layer, or both.
The single decision that determines everything downstream, taken with its legal consequences on the table.
Chain topology, record authority, settlement model, participant interface.
Statutory changes, supervisory approval and participant rulebook amendments.
One instrument, one participant cohort, real settlement, bounded exposure.
Parallel running, participant onboarding, and the path off the legacy rail.
Our board includes the key architect of a national securities depository and its KYC registry, and a former head of distributed systems for a national payments, CBDC and DLT programme.
We have taken a national register from an authoritative database to an authoritative on-chain record, including the legislation that made it lawful.
The tokenized depository — what a CSD becomes when the record it maintains is the asset rather than a claim on one — is part of our Asset State series.
You hold the authoritative record for a national asset class. It is digitised, but it is not yet financeable.
How we help →The board has asked what tokenization means for you. You have pilots and a paper — not a product.
How we help →You have the licence and the users. What you lack is an admitted product on the shelf.
How we help →You own the asset. You lack a wrapper a regulator will admit and a channel that can sell it.
How we help →You have the users and the app. You are missing supply and permission.
How we help →