India has launched the Demat 2.0 pilot to test tokenized corporate bonds and settlement via the Reserve Bank of India’s wholesale digital rupee. The program recorded three issuances totaling ₹1,025 crore (about $116 million): REC raised ₹500 crore from 18 investors with a reported 7.30% coupon and a maturity of one year and nine months; Larsen & Toubro raised ₹500 crore purchased by four investors; and IIFL completed a ₹25 crore deal with a single investor. Demat 2.0 links distributed-ledger ownership records maintained by regulated depositories to the RBI’s Unified Market Interface and enables atomic settlement, so delivery of the tokenized security and payment in CBDC occur in a single transaction. The pilot preserves legal characteristics of conventional securities: each tokenized bond retains its fixed interest rate, maturity date and existing legal rights, and issuers’ disclosure, rating and trustee obligations remain in force. The structure allows corporate actions, interest payments and redemptions to be programmed for automatic delivery to investors’ wholesale CBDC wallets while ownership records stay on depository-maintained ledgers and investors continue to use their existing demat accounts after activating Demat 2.0 and holding a compatible CBDC wallet. Participants named in the project include central market infrastructure and banking entities, and earlier market-size estimates cited India’s corporate bond market at about ₹53.64 lakh crore (roughly $627 billion), though only ₹1,025 crore has moved onto the pilot so far. Initial phases are focused on primary issuance; later phases plan to add secondary trading via existing RFQ platforms and retail access, which would let sellers receive digital-rupee funds immediately rather than waiting the previous two to three days. Regulators have not published target volumes, a firm rollout timeline, or audited figures on operating-cost reductions, and they emphasize the pilot’s atomic-settlement and automation benefits without releasing independent performance reviews.
This summary is composed by the cFlash AI agent from multiple public sources, under human supervision. The content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, financial, legal, or tax advice.