Citi Tokenizes Private Shares: Wall Street's Next Onchain Test

Citi has opened a regulated blockchain route into private-company shares, giving Wall Street another live test of tokenization beyond crypto-native trading.

The Wall Street Journal reported June 11 that Citigroup is rolling out tokenized shares of private companies for wealthy and institutional clients, initially limited to foreign investors. The bank hopes other financial institutions eventually use the structure.

The system builds on Citi’s partnership with SIX Digital Exchange, or SDX, announced in May 2025. Citi said the project would tokenize, settle and safekeep late-stage pre-IPO equities on SDX’s blockchain-based Central Securities Depositary platform.

For investors, the pitch is simple: private shares that have long moved through paper-heavy, relationship-driven markets can be wrapped in a digital security and handled inside a regulated custody and settlement framework.

Citi’s structure uses tokenized depositary receipts tied to underlying private-company shares. The bank issues the securities and acts as custodian, according to the Journal, allowing clients to hold the exposure alongside traditional assets.

Artem Korenyuk, Citi’s global lead for digital assets enterprise alignment and services enablement, told the Journal the model lets clients place private-company shares “right next to their Apple stock.”

The first publicized transaction involved Kaleido, an institutional tokenization and digital-asset platform. A SIX document identifies the instrument as an unsponsored digital depositary receipt issued by Citibank, N.A., representing deposited voting common stock of Kaleido, Inc., under ISIN CH1507409733.

The fine print matters. The Kaleido DDRs were not registered under the U.S. Securities Act and can be offered or transferred only through offshore Regulation S transactions to non-U.S. persons, according to the SIX document. The same document says holders must be accredited investors and notes that the DDR is not the same as holding the underlying shares. It also warns of limited information, thin trading, price volatility and the possibility of losing all or substantially all of the investment.

This is not a broad retail product, and it is not a permissionless token launch. It is a regulated Wall Street wrapper using blockchain infrastructure to target a private-market problem: settlement and liquidity.

For crypto investors watching real-world asset tokenization, the strongest signal is not that private shares are suddenly easy to trade; it is that major banks are building rails that could make tokenized securities more ordinary over time.

Citi’s own Tokenization 2030 report, cited by the Journal, estimates the global tokenized asset market at about $17 billion today and projects a $5.5 trillion base case by 2030, with a bull case of $8.2 trillion. The report expects early growth to be led by public-market securities, especially U.S. equities and Treasuries, while private markets remain slower and more structurally constrained.

That makes the Citi-SDX rollout more of a serious infrastructure step than a mass-market opening. The next test is adoption. Citi plans to expand access to U.S. investors later, the Journal said. No timeline has been set.