India's SEBI Launches Tokenized Bond Pilot with $107 Million in Issuance

India's Securities and Exchange Board (SEBI) has deployed Demat 2.0, a live pilot program for tokenized corporate bonds, with $107 million in issuance already recorded. According to Cointelegraph's reporting, settlement occurs via wholesale CBDC and distributed ledger technology, with smart contracts automating the bond servicing and clearing process.

The pilot represents a sovereign regulator's first institutional-scale deployment of tokenized securities on a blockchain-based infrastructure. Rather than pilot-only testing on sandboxed networks, Demat 2.0 has moved to live issuance and settlement, using India's own wholesale CBDC as the settlement currency and distributed ledger technology as the rails.

Smart contracts handle settlement and service of the bonds on the DLT platform, according to Cointelegraph. The use of a nation's CBDC for settlement distinguishes this from prior tokenized-bond experiments in other jurisdictions, which have relied on traditional payment systems or cryptocurrency settlement layers.

The program name, Demat 2.0, signals an upgrade to India's existing Dematerialized Securities (Demat) account infrastructure, the decades-old system for holding shares and bonds in electronic form. The tokenization addition extends that infrastructure into blockchain-native asset issuance and clearing.