India’s financial regulators have initiated a pioneering pilot to tokenise corporate bonds using blockchain and CBDC technology, signalling a major step towards digitising the country’s asset trading infrastructure amid wider financial inclusion efforts.
India’s financial regulators have taken a step towards bringing blockchain deeper into mainstream market plumbing, launching the country’s first tokenised corporate bond pilot at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai. The Reserve Bank of India and the Securities and Exchange Board of India said the project combines central bank digital currency, or CBDC, with blockchain to settle securities and other assets more efficiently and transparently.
The pilot begins with corporate bonds, but both regulators have signalled that the same tokenisation framework could later be widened to equities, mutual fund units and electronic gold receipts, according to their respective announcements. That would mark a broader attempt to digitise the way assets are issued, traded and settled, rather than limiting the experiment to a single market segment.
Announcing the initiative, RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra framed the effort as part of a larger shift in India’s financial system. He said the festival had become more than a conference and now served as a forum where industry and policymakers could shape finance’s next phase. Malhotra pointed to India’s scale in digital inclusion, citing 57 crore PM-Jan Dhan accounts, 25 crore micro-insurance policies, nine crore people covered under the Atal Pension Scheme and roughly 80 crore UPI transactions, to argue that digital finance is already embedded in daily life.
Malhotra also said the next challenge was to make financial services more ubiquitous, especially for small borrowers, women, micro, small and medium-sized enterprises and farmers who still struggle to access tiny loans through traditional lenders. He stressed that innovation must not come at the expense of confidence, warning that trust can be damaged quickly by opacity, exclusion and cyber risk. “A financial system which moves at the speed of light but does not command trust will not see many takers,” he said.
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