India's Securities and Exchange Board launched the Demat 2.0 pilot on September 11, with three corporate issuers collectively raising over $100 million in tokenized bonds settled through a wholesale central bank digital currency. The pilot represents one of the largest regulated tokenized fixed-income issuances to date in an emerging market, with settlement finality provided directly by the central bank layer rather than a commercial intermediary.
For Armada's crypto repo desk, the SEBI pilot is a live proof point that tokenized bonds can be issued, settled, and custodied at institutional scale with regulatory sanction. As Armada builds out tokenized T-Bill collateral acceptance, the settlement and custody model demonstrated here, particularly the CBDC finality layer, informs what counterparties and regulators will increasingly expect from tokenized collateral infrastructure. The Fireblocks custody integration should be evaluated against how similar pilots handle asset segregation and settlement finality.