India’s securities regulator has moved tokenized corporate bonds from testing into live institutional issuance.
Three issuers raised ₹10.25 billion, or approximately $107.2 million, through tokenized bonds under the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s Demat 2.0 pilot. (SEBI, The Block)
REC Ltd. issued ₹5 billion to 18 investors on September 7. L&T followed with another ₹5 billion to four investors on September 9, while IIFL raised ₹250 million from one investor.
The bonds exist as native digital tokens on a private permissioned ledger operated by India’s securities depositories. The cash side connects to the Reserve Bank of India’s wholesale central-bank digital currency through its Unified Market Interface.
That enables atomic settlement: the security and payment can transfer together instead of relying on separate systems. SEBI says the structure could give issuers same-day access to proceeds, compared with two or three days under the conventional process.
The technology does not create a new asset class. Each tokenized bond retains the same ISIN, coupon, maturity, covenants, issuer obligations and investor rights as its conventional equivalent.
The current phase focuses on institutional issuance. Secondary trading and retail participation are planned for later pilot phases within SEBI’s regulatory sandbox.
TOKEN RECON ASSESSMENT
This is one of the scan’s strongest examples of tokenization performing real financial work.
The pilot combines tokenized securities, regulated depositories and central-bank money, reducing principal risk without creating an unregulated parallel market.
The next confirmation points are secondary-market liquidity, retail access, operational reliability and whether issuance time actually falls in production.
