India’s Securities and Exchange Board launches Demat 2.0, a blockchain-enabled pilot using the digital rupee to settle corporate bonds, potentially transforming the country’s debt market.
India has begun testing a blockchain-based system for corporate bonds that uses the Reserve Bank of India’s wholesale digital rupee to settle trades, in a move that could reshape how one of the country’s largest debt markets operates. According to CoinDesk, the pilot is intended to bring tokenisation into mainstream finance by linking digital bond records with central bank money.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India has launched the programme, called Demat 2.0, around the electronic accounts investors already use to hold securities. Under the system, corporate bonds are issued as digital tokens on a distributed ledger run by regulated market institutions, rather than moving through separate back-office settlement channels. That design is meant to reduce the risk that one side of a trade settles while the other does not.
Several issuers have already used the framework. State-owned REC raised ₹500 crore, or about $56 million, followed by another ₹500 crore issue from Larsen & Toubro and a ₹25 crore, or about $2.8 million, placement by IIFL Finance, according to the reports. Altogether, the early deals amount to roughly ₹1,025 crore, or about $107 million.
The pilot still leaves the bonds themselves largely unchanged: they retain fixed coupons, maturity dates and investor rights. What changes is the plumbing underneath, with the bond token and the digital rupees used to buy it moving together through the Unified Market Interface. Later phases are expected to add secondary trading and, eventually, retail access, which would broaden the experiment beyond its initial institutional base.
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