Itaú Unibanco and OpenAssets will test tokenized debentures and fund shares under ANBIMA's DLT pilot. More than 50 firms signed up. DREX could anchor settlement.
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Itaú Unibanco, Brazil's largest lender and Latin America's biggest bank by market value, is partnering with Pittsburgh-based OpenAssets to test tokenized debentures and investment fund shares under a coordinated industry DLT pilot. The collaboration, announced Aug. 11, runs through a program led by ANBIMA, the country's Financial and Capital Markets Association.
More than 50 organizations have signed up for the pilot, which launched around October 2025. Itaú and OpenAssets will test the full lifecycle of tokenized fixed-income instruments: issuance, trading, settlement, and ongoing management. Debentures, a type of corporate bond common in Brazilian markets, and investment fund shares are the specific targets.
The ANBIMA pilot is Brazil's first coordinated network effort for tokenizing financial assets. Participants are evaluating the technical, operational, governance, and compliance elements that would underpin future digital market infrastructure.
Tokenization infrastructure and standards work come from OpenAssets, including its involvement with the Linux Foundation's Decentralized Trust initiative. Itaú contributes institutional scale and regulatory relationships.
Itaú's digital asset operation dates to 2022, when the bank created Itaú Digital Assets. Custody services for Bitcoin and Ethereum followed.
The pilot runs parallel to DREX, Brazil's central bank digital currency project. DREX is designed as a wholesale settlement layer for tokenized assets, so the rails Itaú and OpenAssets test could eventually plug into central bank money. ANBIMA's program targets the capital markets side, DREX the monetary side. The two form a coordinated push: one handles the instruments that money buys, the other handles the money itself.
Brazil's fixed-income focus separates this effort from tokenized equity products in the US market, where the tokenized QQQ has drawn much of the volume. Whether the standards OpenAssets develops through its Linux Foundation work become interoperable with tokenization programs in Singapore or the EU is an open question. If Brazilian tokenized debentures trade on infrastructure in those jurisdictions, the scope widens well beyond Brazil.
OpenAssets CEO Gabor Gurbacs called Brazil a "pioneer market for advancing tokenization."
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