Powering existing exchanges and brokers. Seturion will provide the settlement layer for existing trading venues, so they can list and trade tokenized securities without a DLT license of their own. That sets Seturion apart from other players like 21X, which operates its own regulated venue and onboards issuers and traders directly. Boerse Stuttgart Group’s own venues connect first, while work with Nasdaq’s Nordic market runs in parallel.

No launch date yet. The license allows Seturion to operate, but Seturion has not set a date for the first transactions. Preparations are progressing well, according to Kruwinnus. At the same time, the market sets the pace: custodian banks need to set up the infrastructure to hold DLT financial instruments, and issuers need to bring tokenized securities to trade.

Busy behind the scenes. On the issuer side, more is happening than the news flow suggests. Announcements of new issuances have been thin since the ECB’s 2024 DLT trials, yet Kruwinnus says activity has picked up sharply and almost every large bank is now working on topics related to DLT financial instruments, such as wallet infrastructures and tokenization. Access to DeFi markets is rarely the priority. Most issuers are instead looking to make existing products more efficient across the full lifecycle, from issuance and settlement to custody.

Germany’s first Sparkassen roll out crypto trading

BBVA and Santander put syndicated loan on shared ledger

Why it matters: Syndicated loans are a core part of corporate financing, with $1.4 trillion signed in Europe alone in 2025. They let several lenders, mostly banks, share a loan too large or too risky for any one of them. Sharing a loan also means sharing its administration, and that work remains largely manual: an agent bank keeps the master record and coordinates payments, notices and consents through emails and documents, while each lender maintains its own books and reconciles them against the agent’s. A shared ledger gives all parties the same record in real time, aiming to reduce the reconciliation work, errors and back-and-forth that make syndicated loans costly to run.

One shared view: Once the loan agreement is signed, Iberdrola, the agent bank and the lenders can access the same digital record through a web platform. It shows which bank holds which share of the loan and how those positions change over time. The record is stored on a private blockchain built on Hyperledger Besu, which is compatible with Ethereum.

The loan’s life on record: Much of a syndicated loan’s administration comes after the money is paid out, as banks calculate interest, track repayments, check whether the borrower meets agreed financial conditions and approve changes to the terms. The platform can record these events in one shared history without overwriting earlier entries. The banks confirmed that formalisation and disbursement took place on the platform, but declined to disclose which subsequent events have occurred.

Payments stay offchain: The cash leg still runs on existing rails. When Iberdrola drew the loan, the platform generated and sent the payment instructions, but bank staff executed the euro transfers manually through their existing payment systems.

Not yet connected: The platform also operates separately from the banks’ existing loan and accounting systems. Banks therefore use the shared blockchain record alongside their own internal software, rather than having all information and processes automatically connected.

“One of the main lessons was to define the scope carefully. Rather than moving every activity related to the operation onto blockchain, this first phase focused on supporting the management of the financing throughout its lifecycle,” BBVA and Santander told Blockstories.