Seven British banks moved tokenised sterling between each other on Thursday in the first live customer transactions of their kind. The settlement is not the interesting part. The condition attached to it is.
Pontes went live on Monday with fourteen institutions and four ledger operators. It gives tokenised markets a cash leg that is neither a stablecoin nor a bank's deposit token.
The Policy Address commits the HKMA to testing tokenised Exchange Fund Bills by year-end. Of all the assets it could have picked, it chose the one banks pledge for liquidity.
Singapore's three largest banks paid each other in tokenised deposits for the first time. The shared ledger matched the obligations; the money still moved the old way.
The institutional pattern is parallel operation: distributed ledgers running alongside legacy systems until the numbers justify migration.
Payment-versus-payment settlement on shared ledgers is moving from proofs of concept to scheduled operations in a handful of currency corridors.