Institutional Tokenization Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Sarah Davis, Digital Finance & Fintech | Last updated: September 4, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Across six major financial centres, the average Institutional Settlement Depth Index (ISDI) reading compiled by Axis Intelligence Research is 45 out of 100 as of September 4, 2026. Hong Kong SAR leads at 72. The United States — home to a securities depository holding $114 trillion — sits last at 20, because every point it scores comes from the asset side and none from the money side.
Quick Answer
Institutional tokenization in 2026 is asymmetric. The asset leg is moving into production: The Depository Trust Company custodies over $114 trillion in securities and ran live tokenized production trades in July 2026, while the Bank for International Settlements counts over 60 tokenised bonds worth $8 billion issued to date. The cash leg is not. Axis Intelligence Research finds that only three of six surveyed jurisdictions have settled real institutional transactions in tokenised central bank money, and the resulting ISDI spread between first place (Hong Kong SAR, 72) and last (United States, 20) is 52 points.
Key Findings
- Axis Intelligence Research finds the mean Institutional Settlement Depth Index reading across six jurisdictions is 45 of a possible 100 as of September 4, 2026, with Hong Kong SAR highest at 72 and the United States lowest at 20.
- According to the Bank for International Settlements, over 60 tokenised bonds worth $8 billion have been issued to date, against a global government debt market the BIS sizes at $80 trillion.
- Axis Intelligence Research calculates that even if the entire $8 billion tokenised bond stock were sovereign debt, it would represent one basis point of that $80 trillion market.
- The BIS reports that tokenised money market fund total value locked rose from about $770 million at end-2023 to almost $9 billion by end-October 2025, an increase of roughly 11.7 times across a sample of 36 funds.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that the HKSAR Government’s November 2025 digital green bond, at around HK$10 billion, equalled roughly 16% of the entire cumulative tokenised bond value the BIS had recorded four months earlier.
What Is the Institutional Settlement Depth Index (ISDI)?
Most tokenization scoreboards count assets. That measurement answers the wrong question, because a tokenised bond that settles against a wire transfer two days later has not changed how the market works — it has changed the file format.
ISDI — the Institutional Settlement Depth Index — measures something narrower and, for institutions, more decisive: how far a jurisdiction has moved a complete tokenised transaction into production, money leg included. Axis Intelligence Research built it because the public record is unusually good here. Central banks, debt management offices and market infrastructures publish dated documents when they move a rail from experiment to production, and those documents can be checked by anyone.
The index scores six jurisdictions across five components, 20 points each, on an evidence-tiered scale.
ISDI components and scoring tiers
| Component | Code | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Tokenised central bank money | CBM | Availability of central bank money to settle the cash leg on or against a ledger |
| Collateral eligibility | COL | Whether DLT-issued securities are eligible collateral for central bank credit operations |
| Sovereign tokenised issuance | SOV | Whether the sovereign or its sub-national entities have issued tokenised debt |
| Tokenised commercial bank money | CBK | Whether tokenised deposits are used for real-value institutional settlement |
| Regulated market plumbing | MKT | Whether a supervised FMI or statutory regime supports tokenised issuance and settlement |
Each component is scored: 20 where the capability is live in production or legally in force; 12 where a dated real-value pilot is running; 6 where a dated experiment or formal commitment exists; 0 where no primary document was located as of the snapshot date. A zero means the evidence was not found, not that the capability is impossible.
ISDI = CBM + COL + SOV + CBK + MKT, equally weighted at 20 points each, maximum 100. Snapshot date: September 4, 2026.
ISDI readings by jurisdiction, September 4, 2026
| Rank | Jurisdiction | CBM | COL | SOV | CBK | MKT | ISDI | Anchor document |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hong Kong SAR | 20 | 0 | 20 | 12 | 20 | 72 | HKMA, Third Digital Green Bonds pricing, Nov 11, 2025 |
| 2 | Euro area | 12 | 20 | 6 | 6 | 20 | 64 | ECB, DLT collateral eligibility press release, Jan 27, 2026 |
| 3 | Switzerland | 20 | 0 | 12 | 0 | 20 | 52 | SNB, Project Helvetia extension, Jun 30, 2025 |
| 4 | Singapore | 20 | 0 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 38 | MAS, live wholesale CBDC settlement trial, Nov 13, 2025 |
| 5 | United Kingdom | 0 | 0 | 6 | 6 | 12 | 24 | HM Treasury, DIGIT pilot update, Jul 16, 2026 |
| 6 | United States | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 20 | 20 | DTCC, DTC tokenization service release, May 4, 2026 |
| — | Mean | 12.0 | 3.3 | 8.3 | 5.0 | 16.3 | 45.0 | — |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research, compiled from primary central bank, government and market infrastructure documents. Full component evidence in the downloadable dataset.
The component means expose the shape of the market better than the rankings do. Regulated market plumbing averages 16.3 of 20 — the highest of the five. Collateral eligibility averages 3.3, the lowest, and only one jurisdiction scores at all. Institutions have built the venues. They have not yet been given the money.
Sarah Davis: Split the index down the middle and the story gets blunter. Sum the two money components — CBM and CBK — and Hong Kong scores 32, Singapore 26, Switzerland 20, the euro area 18, the UK 6 and the United States 0. Sum the two asset-and-venue components and the United States scores 20 with a depository holding $114 trillion behind it. That is not a country that is behind on tokenization. That is a country that has tokenised the securities and left the dollar exactly where it was.
How Big Is the Institutional Tokenized Bond Market in 2026?
The Bank for International Settlements published the most careful public count in July 2025. Its researchers identified over 60 tokenised bonds issued to date, totalling $8 billion. Within that, they held detailed records for 24 corporate issues worth $3.8 billion and 15 sovereign, supranational and agency issues worth $1.9 billion — a working sample of 39 bonds. Issuers named include the Republic of Slovenia, Hong Kong SAR, the Republic of the Philippines, the Bank of Thailand, the European Investment Bank, the World Bank, and the Swiss cantons of Basel, Zurich, Lugano and St Gallen.
Set that against the denominator in the same BIS analysis: global government debt of $80 trillion.
Axis Intelligence Research calculates that $8 billion is one basis point of $80 trillion. That figure is stated deliberately as an upper bound, because the $8 billion includes corporate paper. The true sovereign share is smaller. We publish the bound rather than a false precision.
What the BIS found when it compared tokenised bonds with matched conventional bonds
| Metric | Tokenised | Conventional | Axis-calculated difference | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean bid-ask spread | 19 bp | 30 bp | −36.7% | BIS Bulletin 107, Jul 10, 2025 |
| Minimum investment amount | $110,000 | $185,000 | −40.5% | BIS Bulletin 107, Jul 10, 2025 |
| Issuance cost | No systematic difference | — | — | BIS Bulletin 107, Jul 10, 2025 |
The BIS matched each tokenised bond to a conventional bond from the same issuer, in the same currency, with the same coupon type. The liquidity gap is real but modest. The access gap is larger: a 40.5% lower entry ticket is the kind of number that changes who can hold sovereign paper, not just how fast it settles.
Sarah Davis: Eleven basis points of spread on an $80 trillion market is not a rounding error, it is a business case — but only if the volume arrives. Right now the sample is 39 bonds. The BIS itself says legal and regulatory uncertainty, not liquidity or cost, is the binding constraint. That is an unusual finding. Usually the technology is the excuse.
How Much Has Hong Kong Actually Issued?
Hong Kong is the reason the ISDI leaderboard looks the way it does, and the November 2025 issuance is the reason why.
The HKSAR Government priced around HK$10 billion of digital green bonds on November 10, 2025, across four currencies, under the Government Sustainable Bond Programme. Total subscriptions across the four tranches exceeded HK$130 billion.
The four tranches
| Tranche | Size | Tenor | Coupon | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HKD | HK$2.5 billion | 2 years | 2.500% | HKMA, Nov 11, 2025 |
| RMB | RMB 2.5 billion | 5 years | 1.900% | HKMA, Nov 11, 2025 |
| USD | US$300 million | 3 years | 3.633% | HKMA, Nov 11, 2025 |
| EUR | €300 million | 4 years | 2.512% | HKMA, Nov 11, 2025 |
Three Axis-calculated figures follow directly from the HKMA’s own disclosure:
- Oversubscription: 13.0×. HK$130 billion of demand against a HK$10 billion issue.
- US dollar equivalent: approximately $1.28 billion, converting the stated HK$10 billion at the Linked Exchange Rate System midpoint of 7.80 HKD/USD.
- Share of the global tokenised bond stock: approximately 16%. $1.28 billion against the $8 billion cumulative total the BIS recorded in July 2025.
That last figure is the one worth carrying. Axis Intelligence Research finds that a single sovereign issuance in November 2025 was equivalent to roughly one-sixth of every tokenised bond ever counted by the BIS as of four months earlier. The market is not just small — it is lumpy, and one debt management office can move it.
The settlement design matters as much as the size. The HKMA states that for the HKD and RMB tranches, settlement via tokenised central bank money was offered alongside traditional rails, using e-HKD and e-CNY. The bonds cleared through the Central Moneymarkets Unit, on HSBC Orion, at T+1, with statutory settlement finality under Hong Kong law and Digital Token Identifiers under ISO 24165 obtained for all four tranches.
This was Hong Kong’s third digital bond issuance since 2023, and the Financial Secretary stated that the Government will regularise tokenised bond issuance.
Sarah Davis: Read the standards line, not the headline. DTIs linked to ISINs and to the issuer’s Legal Entity Identifier means the bond is addressable by the same reference-data plumbing an asset manager already runs. That is the unglamorous work that decides whether a second buyer shows up. A 13× book is nice. A book that a European insurer’s middle office can actually process is what makes it repeatable.
What Is Settling the Cash Leg?
This is the question the ISDI was built to answer, and the answers differ sharply by jurisdiction.
Euro area: collateral first, settlement second
The Eurosystem ran the largest documented exercise. Between May and November 2024, 60 financial sector firms and four central banks — 64 participants — conducted over 50 trials and experiments, settling over 200 transactions with a total value of €1.59 billion in real central bank money. Axis Intelligence Research notes that this implies an average transaction value of no more than €7.95 million, since the ECB reports “over 200” transactions; the true average is lower.
Two dated commitments followed. The ECB’s Appia paper, published March 11, 2026, confirms that Pontes will bridge market DLT platforms to TARGET Services by end-Q3 2026, and that the long-term Appia blueprint is envisaged for 2028.
The more consequential decision is quieter. On January 27, 2026, the ECB announced that the Eurosystem would accept marketable assets issued in central securities depositories using DLT as eligible collateral for Eurosystem credit operations as of March 30, 2026. That is the only 20-point COL score in the index. A tokenised bond that a bank can repo with its central bank is a different instrument from one it cannot.
Switzerland and Singapore: production money, thinner venues
The Swiss National Bank has provided wholesale central bank digital currency on the SIX Digital Exchange since the end of 2023, and on June 30, 2025 extended the pilot until at least mid-2027, while expanding it to settle tokenised assets with traditional central bank money through an RTGS link to BX Digital. Switzerland scores 20 on CBM on the strength of production usage, and zero on collateral eligibility for want of a comparable published decision.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore announced on November 13, 2025 the successful completion of a live trial settling interbank overnight lending in wholesale CBDC on the SGD Testnet, involving DBS, OCBC and UOB — with transactions recorded in the banks’ official books and regulatory filings. That last clause is why it scores 20 rather than 6. MAS has said tokenised MAS Bills settled in CBDC will follow, which is a commitment rather than an issuance, so Singapore’s SOV component scores 6.
United Kingdom: the venue exists, the instrument does not yet
HM Treasury confirmed on July 16, 2026 that the first Digital Gilt Instrument (DIGIT) transaction will take place by Q1 2027, on HSBC Orion operating as a digital securities depository within the Digital Securities Sandbox. HSBC was appointed platform provider on February 12, 2026. Until a gilt is actually issued and a cash leg actually settles, the UK’s SOV and CBK components sit at 6.
United States: everything except the money
The United States has the deepest asset-side infrastructure and no tokenised central bank money at all. In December 2025, The Depository Trust Company received an SEC no-action letter authorising a defined tokenization service for three years, covering Russell 1000 constituents, ETFs tracking major indices, and US Treasury bills, bonds and notes. DTCC confirmed on May 4, 2026 that limited production trades would run in July 2026 with a full service launch in October 2026, developed with an industry working group DTCC describes as more than 50 firms. Axis Intelligence Research counted 57 firms named in that release, spanning custodians, asset managers, brokers, trading venues and digital asset infrastructure providers.
DTCC states that DTC custodies assets valued at over $114 trillion, and that its subsidiaries processed securities transactions valued at $4.7 quadrillion in 2025.
Against that, the cash leg remains conventional. The SEC’s proposed innovation exemption for tokenized securities did not reach a vote in 2026, and the US scores zero on all four non-venue components.
Sarah Davis: The euro area and the United States have reached the same conclusion from opposite directions. Frankfurt made a tokenised bond financeable at the central bank before making it settleable in central bank money. Washington made it settleable at the depository without touching the money at all. Both are hedges. Only one of them lets a bank fund the position.
Where Are Tokenized Funds Concentrated?
The fund segment is the fastest-growing and the most concentrated, and the BIS documented both in November 2025.
Tokenised money market fund total value locked stood at about $770 million at end-2023 and reached almost $9 billion by the end of October 2025, based on a sample of 36 funds — a multiple of roughly 11.7×. Over the same period the chain mix shifted: Stellar led early because it supports cheap small transfers, but Ethereum now accounts for 50% of TVL as institutional funds arrived.
Concentration is the finding institutions should read twice. For BUIDL and for the WisdomTree Government Money Market Digital Fund, the BIS reports that around 90% of total holdings sit with only four wallet holders per fund. Some funds set institutional minimums of $5 million.
What a tokenised money fund actually holds
Average holdings of the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, February–April 2025:
| Asset class | Share | Source |
|---|---|---|
| US Treasury repo | 54.6% | BIS Bulletin 115, Nov 26, 2025 |
| US Treasury debt | 16.1% | BIS Bulletin 115, Nov 26, 2025 |
| Agency debt | 15.5% | BIS Bulletin 115, Nov 26, 2025 |
| Cash | 13.8% | BIS Bulletin 115, Nov 26, 2025 |
The portfolio is a conventional government money fund. What is new is the register, the transferability and the wallet allow-list — and the BIS is direct that allow-listing duplicates work across funds, restricts liquidity, and can be bypassed in practice when tokens are wrapped or traded on onboarded platforms.
A note on a ratio we will not publish. Franklin Templeton and the Stellar Development Foundation stated that the BENJI suite represented $1.98 billion in AUM as of April 29, 2026. It is tempting to divide that into the BIS $9 billion figure to produce a market share. We do not, because the BIS figure is dated end-October 2025 and covers a 36-fund sample on a TVL basis, while the BENJI figure is a suite-level AUM six months later. The two are not the same measurement. Both are reported separately in the dataset.
Who Solved the Custody Problem First?
On August 12, 2026, the SEC’s Division of Investment Management issued a no-action letter that is more important than its length suggests. It told Franklin Templeton that staff would not recommend enforcement action if the firm’s registered open-end and closed-end funds hold shares of the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund without complying with paragraphs (b), (e) and (f) of Rule 17f-2 under the Investment Company Act of 1940 — the paragraphs written for securities in a physical vault.
The letter is conditioned on 12 representations. The load-bearing ones concern control rather than cryptography: the affiliated transfer agent maintains the master securityholder file, controls permissioning and smart-contract administrative functions, and can correct errors, freeze or migrate wallet records, and restore the official ownership record. It must transfer those administrative controls to any successor. Each investing fund’s independent accountants must perform at least three verifications per fiscal year, at least two without prior notice.
The letter also states the operational rationale the funds gave: hourly net asset value calculations and intraday trading, against the end-of-day or monthly processing of their existing cash management vehicle. The fund’s primary blockchain is Stellar.
Sarah Davis: Everyone argued about who holds the private key. The SEC’s answer was that the key is not the point — the question is who can rebuild the register when something goes wrong. Twelve conditions, and the private key appears as one factor among many. Any asset manager reading that letter now knows the shape of the answer, which is why it will be copied before it is celebrated.
What Are Central Banks Building for Cross-Border Settlement?
On May 27, 2026, the Bank for International Settlements published the prototype report for Project Agorá, convened with the Institute of International Finance. The project brought together seven central banks — the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Banque de France representing the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico and the Swiss National Bank — and more than 40 regulated financial institutions.
The prototype combined tokenised commercial bank deposits with tokenised central bank reserves and demonstrated atomic multi-currency settlement, where a cross-border chain completes on an all-or-nothing basis rather than moving sequentially through intermediaries. The BIS states the work will advance to real-value testing, with the Bank of Canada joining.
Read alongside the ISDI table, Agorá explains the gap. Seven of the world’s principal central banks agree on the architecture. Only three of the six jurisdictions in our index have put any of it into production domestically.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure in this article was retrieved from a primary document during production between September 3 and September 4, 2026: central bank press releases and research bulletins, government press releases, an SEC staff letter, and a market infrastructure press release. No aggregator, vendor estimate or forecast is used as the source of any figure. Where the BIS itself cites third-party data within its bulletins, that dependency is recorded in the dataset’s method notes.
ISDI construction. Six jurisdictions were selected on the basis that each has published at least one dated primary document evidencing institutional tokenisation activity in a supervised setting. Five components are scored 0/6/12/20 on the evidence tiers stated above and summed without weighting adjustments, giving a 0–100 range. Equal weighting is a deliberate choice: no public evidence supports a claim that any one rail is more decisive than another, and an unweighted index is reproducible by a third party from the same documents. The index measures documented settlement depth only. It does not measure market size, issuance volume, regulatory quality or the commercial prospects of any jurisdiction.
Reproducibility. Each of the 30 component scores is mapped in the dataset to a named source document, URL and retrieval date. A reader who disagrees with a score can substitute their own and recompute the reading.
Currency conversion. The HKD-to-USD figure uses 7.80 HKD/USD, the midpoint of Hong Kong’s Linked Exchange Rate System, applied to the HK$10 billion issue size stated by the HKMA. No other conversions are performed; RMB, USD and EUR tranche sizes are reported as issued.
Arithmetic control. All Axis-calculated figures were computed twice — once in floating point and once in exact rational arithmetic — and the results reconciled before drafting.
Scope. Three deliberate exclusions. First, cross-source ratios combining figures with different as-of dates or measurement bases are not published; the BENJI-to-TMMF example is documented above rather than silently computed. Second, tokenised assets outside institutional capital markets — retail equity wrappers, commodities and private credit — are out of scope for this page. Third, a zero on any ISDI component records the absence of a located primary document as of the snapshot date, not a finding that a capability does not exist.
About This Dataset
Contents. 139 observations covering ISDI component scores and readings for six jurisdictions, tokenised bond and fund market statistics, sovereign issuance terms, and dated central bank and regulatory milestones, spanning December 2023 to August 2026.
Format. UTF-8 CSV, one row per observation, with source_org, source_document, source_url, retrieved_date, is_primary, axis_calculated and method_note columns on every row.
Licence. CC BY 4.0. Free to reuse, including commercially, with attribution.
Citation format: Axis Intelligence Research, Institutional Tokenization Statistics 2026, 2026.
Cite this page
APA: Axis Intelligence Research, & Davis, S. (2026). Institutional tokenization statistics 2026: Banks, bonds, funds & digital money. Axis Intelligence Research. https://axis-intelligence.com/institutional-tokenization-statistics/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research, and Sarah Davis. “Institutional Tokenization Statistics 2026: Banks, Bonds, Funds & Digital Money.” Axis Intelligence Research, 4 Sept. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/institutional-tokenization-statistics/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research and Sarah Davis. “Institutional Tokenization Statistics 2026: Banks, Bonds, Funds & Digital Money.” Axis Intelligence Research. September 4, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/institutional-tokenization-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
What settles the cash leg of an institutional tokenised bond trade in 2026?
It depends on the jurisdiction, and in most cases it is still conventional money. Hong Kong offered tokenised central bank money — e-HKD and e-CNY — as an option alongside traditional rails for two tranches of its November 2025 digital green bond. Switzerland settles tokenised bonds on SIX Digital Exchange in Swiss franc wholesale CBDC. Singapore settled interbank overnight lending in SGD wholesale CBDC in November 2025. The euro area’s Pontes bridge to TARGET Services is due by end-Q3 2026. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the cash leg remains off-ledger.
Are DLT-issued securities accepted as central bank collateral anywhere?
In the euro area, yes, as of March 30, 2026. The ECB announced on January 27, 2026 that the Eurosystem would accept marketable assets issued in central securities depositories using DLT as eligible collateral for credit operations, provided they meet the standard eligibility criteria and are reachable via TARGET2-Securities. The Eurosystem has separately launched work on whether assets issued on DLT and not held in eligible securities settlement systems could become eligible later. No comparable published decision was located for the other five jurisdictions in the index.
Is a tokenised money market fund legally a money market fund?
Not always. The BIS is explicit that tokenised money market fund shares are classified as securities but not always as money market funds. Some are digital representations of shares in a conventional US government money market fund operating under Rule 2a-7, which requires at least 99.5% of assets in cash, government securities and repos collateralised by them. Others are private funds offered only to qualified purchasers under exemptions — a structure common for international funds because it allows greater flexibility. The wrapper determines the investor protections, not the token.
Why does wallet allow-listing limit tokenised fund liquidity?
Because compliance requires that tokens do not move freely between wallets of unknown beneficiaries, each fund administrator maintains its own allow-list of onboarded wallets. The BIS identifies three consequences: duplication across funds, impracticality at scale for large investor bases, and restricted secondary liquidity that limits the use of these tokens to meet margin calls. It also notes the list can be circumvented in practice when tokens are wrapped into other instruments or traded on platforms that have onboarded investors independently. Shared wallet identity systems are the direction the BIS suggests.
Does tokenisation actually reduce bond issuance costs?
The BIS found no systematic difference in issuance costs between tokenised bonds and matched conventional bonds from the same issuer. The measurable gains were elsewhere: a mean bid-ask spread of 19 basis points against 30 for conventional bonds, and a mean minimum investment of $110,000 against $185,000. The BIS attributes the binding constraint on adoption to legal and regulatory uncertainty and limited market experience rather than to cost or liquidity.
Who bears the risk when a fund’s shareholder register sits on a blockchain?
Under the structure the SEC accepted in its August 12, 2026 no-action letter, the affiliated transfer agent does. The relief was conditioned on that agent maintaining unilateral control of the master securityholder file, retaining administrative controls to correct errors or unauthorised transactions, freeze or migrate wallet records and restore the official record, and transferring those controls to any successor. A compromised wallet key, on this reasoning, does not create a competing ownership record.
Why does the United States rank last on ISDI despite having the largest tokenization infrastructure?
Because ISDI scores settlement depth, not market size. The United States scores the maximum 20 on regulated market plumbing — DTC’s SEC-authorised tokenization service, the July 2026 live production trades and the October 2026 launch — and zero on tokenised central bank money, collateral eligibility, sovereign tokenised issuance and tokenised commercial bank money. It is the widest internal split of any jurisdiction in the index and reflects a deliberate policy configuration, not a lack of capability.
What would move a jurisdiction’s ISDI reading in the next twelve months?
Four events would each shift a component by 8 to 20 points: the go-live of the Eurosystem’s Pontes pilot, due by end-Q3 2026; the first DIGIT issuance in the United Kingdom, due by Q1 2027; the issuance of tokenised MAS Bills settled in Singapore dollar wholesale CBDC; and the launch of DTC’s full tokenization service in October 2026. A collateral eligibility decision outside the euro area would move the lowest-scoring component in the entire index.