India’s top securities regulator just made its most concrete move yet toward putting bonds on a blockchain. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) announced plans to pilot tokenised corporate bonds using digital ledger technology, with a rollout expected within six to nine months.
The announcement, made by SEBI Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey at the Care Edge Debt Market Summit in Mumbai, came paired with a second initiative: a comprehensive overhaul of disclosure requirements for listed debt securities. The goal is to bring bond disclosure norms in line with the standards already applied to equities, a shift that could reshape how India’s corporate debt market operates.
What tokenisation actually means here
Instead of bonds settling through layers of intermediaries over multiple days, tokenised bonds can settle nearly instantaneously. SEBI is betting on this to solve several chronic problems that have plagued India’s corporate bond market: limited liquidity, high transaction costs, poor traceability, and clunky manual servicing processes.
India’s corporate bond market currently sits at approximately $0.56 trillion. That represents roughly 15% of the country’s GDP.
