The NSE pioneers India’s first tokenised corporate bond issues, signalling a potential shift in market infrastructure and access, as REC and Larsen & Toubro raise ₹1,000 crore through innovative digital platforms under regulatory scrutiny.
The National Stock Exchange of India has taken a significant step towards digitising the country’s corporate bond market by facilitating India’s first tokenised bond issues, with REC Limited and Larsen & Toubro together raising ₹1,000 crore. According to reports from Indian business outlets, the deals were executed on the exchange’s electronic bidding platform under the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s regulatory sandbox framework, giving regulators and market participants an early test of how tokenisation could work in mainstream debt markets.
The first of the two issues came from REC, which raised ₹500 crore in a deal that was reported to have attracted strong demand. Larsen & Toubro followed with its own ₹500 crore issue, extending the experiment beyond a state-backed borrower into the private sector. Market observers said that mix matters: if both issuers and investors can use the same digital rails with confidence, tokenised bonds could eventually help speed settlement, improve record-keeping and widen access to corporate debt.
The technology was formally unveiled at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai, where Reserve Bank of India Governor Sanjay Malhotra and Securities and Exchange Board of India chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey presented the initiative. The timing underlined the growing official interest in using financial technology to modernise market infrastructure, while keeping new products inside a controlled regulatory environment.
For India’s bond market, still far less familiar to retail investors than shares, the development is notable less for its novelty than for what it suggests about future plumbing. Tokenisation, in this context, means representing ownership of a bond digitally so that issuance and trading can be handled more efficiently. If the pilot proves durable, it could become a template for broader adoption across corporate debt, though the real test will be whether the system can scale without adding complexity or operational risk.
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