Corporate debt

Market state

This is the class with the best independent measurement and the smallest outstanding stock. The European Central Bank, in its Macroprudential Bulletin of 13 April 2026, counted 183 tokenised bonds issued between August 2018 and November 2025, with 88% of that issuance occurring in the last three years of the period. Two-thirds of issuers were domiciled in Germany, reflecting the country's Electronic Securities Act, and financial and non-financial corporations accounted for 91% of issuers.

The ECB's central finding is that tokenisation has produced measurable, if modest, market-quality gains. Matching 41 tokenised bonds against 546 conventional bonds, it found yield spreads 0.14 percentage points lower - a roughly 40% reduction, significant at 5% - and bid-ask spreads 0.05 percentage points lower, a 27% reduction, also significant at 5%. Underwriting fees were 0.04 percentage points higher, without statistical significance. The liquidity improvement did not extend to retail-accessible tokenised bonds, and the ECB cautioned on small sample sizes.

Participation remains shallow: only 44% of issuers had issued both tokenised and conventional debt, and of those, just 38% had issued more than one tokenised bond. Repeat issuance, not first issuance, is the constraint.

Platform-level data fill in the rest. HSBC said its Orion platform had supported more than $3.5bn of digitally native bonds globally as of 12 February 2026. Progmat announced on 25 February 2026 that it would migrate more than $2bn of tokenised securities, including corporate bonds, to a dedicated Avalanche layer-1. Within RWA.xyz's credit category, STOKR's Blockstream Mining Note 2 on Liquid was the largest corporate note at $747.6m on 25 July 2026.

Market structure

Almost all tokenised corporate debt is privately placed to a small group of institutional investors and held to maturity. Issuance runs through a bank-operated or licensed platform - HSBC Orion, SIX Digital Exchange, Progmat, Cashlink - rather than a public blockchain, because the legal act of constituting a security on a ledger requires a statutory basis that national law grants to registered platforms.

Germany is the centre of gravity, supplying two-thirds of issuers in the ECB's sample, because the Electronic Securities Act created that statutory basis early. Luxembourg, Switzerland and Japan provide the other main frameworks.

Settlement is the unresolved half of the trade. Delivery-versus-payment requires a tokenised cash leg, which has come from central-bank trials - the ECB and Swiss National Bank exploratory DLT work drove a measurable share of 2024 issuance - or from tokenised deposits and commercial-bank money on the same platform. Without a reliable cash leg, tokenised bonds settle against conventional payment, which removes most of the operational benefit.

Secondary markets barely exist. The ECB's measured bid-ask improvement comes from a small matched sample, not from active turnover, and no benchmark index or continuous quote exists for the class.

Risks

The market is too small and too fragmented to have a price. With 183 bonds issued over seven years across several incompatible platforms, there is no term structure, no benchmark and no reliable mark for a holder who needs one.

Repeat issuance is the binding weakness: most issuers have come once. That pattern is consistent with tokenised issues being treated as pilots funded by relationship banks rather than as a funding channel, and it means the cost savings the ECB measured may not persist as pricing normalises.

Settlement-asset dependency is acute. Issuance volumes have moved with central-bank trial windows, which is a fragile demand base.

Legal risk is jurisdiction-specific. Whether a ledger entry constitutes good title, and how insolvency and finality are treated, depends on national statute; cross-border holding introduces conflict-of-laws exposure that conventional CSD structures resolve.

The ECB also found that liquidity benefits did not reach retail-accessible tokenised bonds, so the case for widening distribution to retail investors is not supported by the available evidence.

Regulatory treatment

Germany's Electronic Securities Act is the single most consequential framework for this class, accounting for two-thirds of issuers in the ECB's August 2018 to November 2025 sample. Luxembourg's blockchain legislation and Switzerland's DLT Act provide the other principal European bases, with SIX Digital Exchange operating as a regulated exchange and CSD for digital bonds.

At EU level, tokenised bonds are MiFID II instruments, and trading and settlement run under the DLT Pilot Regime. The European Commission's 4 December 2025 proposal would raise the platform issuance ceiling from €6bn to €100bn, introduce a €10bn simplified tier and extend eligibility to all MiFID II securities. The ECB's own analysis, published 13 April 2026, provides the evidentiary basis for that expansion.

The United Kingdom runs digital debt issuance through the Digital Securities Sandbox; HSBC received UK approval to use Orion for tokenised bond issuance and was appointed on 12 February 2026 as platform provider for HM Treasury's Digital Gilt Instrument pilot.

Japan's Financial Instruments and Exchange Act governs security tokens, with Progmat as the dominant issuance platform. The International Capital Market Association maintains a tracker of new financial-technology applications in bond markets, which remains the reference list of individual transactions.