India's First Tokenized Bond Pilot Set for September

The most ambitious piece is the cash leg. SEBI is collaborating with the RBI to enable simultaneous transfer of securities and cash on-chain, a concept known as delivery-versus-payment (DvP). If that works, a bond trade could clear and settle in near real-time instead of the current T+2 cycle, where two business days pass between execution and final settlement.

Two days might not sound like much. In a market processing trillions of rupees in issuances annually (FY26 issuances reached approximately ₹9.11 trillion), that gap creates counterparty risk, ties up collateral, and generates reconciliation headaches across the financial system. India's corporate bond market has grown from roughly ₹17.5 trillion in 2015 to more than ₹60 trillion today.

The integration with the e-rupee is the most consequential part of the pilot. Most tokenized bond experiments elsewhere still settle the cash side through traditional banking rails, limiting the speed gain. If India can execute both securities transfer and payment on DLT simultaneously, it leapfrogs the partial solutions other jurisdictions have deployed.

The RBI launched its wholesale CBDC pilot in late 2022, initially focused on government securities settlement among a small group of banks. Extending that framework to corporate bonds would be a meaningful expansion of the e-rupee's use case.