We’ve heard this story before, but this time it really does look like showdown territory for the Clarity Act.

According to various reports, a new draft of the US market structure bill is expected to hit the Senate any day now. It merges the two bills that the Banking and Agriculture Committees advanced earlier this year.

Once introduced, the Senate has until August 7 to find 60 votes before the summer recess. Miss that window, and the bill drifts into midterm campaigning and fall spending debates, where floor time is scarce and bipartisan votes even scarcer.

Passage requires at least seven Democrats to cross over, and even then the House still waits. All that political friction is why Polymarket currently puts the odds of the bill being signed into law this year at just 41%, a figure that still includes the September and lame-duck paths, not only passage before August.

Source: Polymarket

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Not everyone is waiting for clarity, though. Yesterday, the DTCC processed its first live production trades with tokenized securities.

You can think of it as a show match before the main event, which will be the full commercial launch of its tokenization service in October.

We covered the platform’s architecture back in May. The big takeaway from yesterday is that the DTCC can indeed tokenize and untokenize the $114 trillion in US securities it custodies.

Not surprising, exactly. But it does show that some corners of the industry generate their own clarity. No Senate votes required, just a no-action letter from a convinced regulator.

In today’s Briefing:

  • The UK unveils a digital assets task force with BlackRock and JPMorgan

  • Swift is set to launch an MVP of its shared ledger with 17 banks

HIGH SIGNAL NEWS

  • Five Spanish banks test a tokenized deposit interbank system. ABANCA, Cecabank, Ibercaja, Kutxabank, and Unicaja say they have completed the country's first full-service proof of concept for tokenized deposits. Startup ioBuilders provides the underlying technology through its tokenization platform, Asseto. 🇪🇸

  • Hyundai completes an enterprise treasury cross-border payment using USD₮. The South Korean industrial group used Tether's dollar-backed stablecoin to transfer $20,000 between its subsidiaries, Hyundai Motor America and Hyundai Motor Mexico, before converting the funds back into U.S. dollars. The transaction was executed through Axiym, a fintech in which Tether holds a strategic stake and which provides a treasury and settlement layer, and was conducted on the Avalanche blockchain network. 🇰🇷

  • UK launches a digital assets industry taskforce. Bringing together 54 members, including JPMorgan, BlackRock, and Goldman Sachs, the initiative has been mandated to deliver a 12-month roadmap to accelerate the tokenization of the UK's financial markets. As part of this effort, it aims to conduct a series of tokenized repo transactions by spring 2027. 🇬🇧

TOP STORY

Swift Opens Its Shared Ledger to Initial Use With 17 Banks

Moving forward: Last week, Swift said its blockchain-based ledger was ready for initial use. Seventeen banks, including Citi, Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas, and BNY, are preparing live pilot transactions using tokenized deposits for 24/7 cross-border payments.

  • Why it matters: Banks have already shown tokenized deposits work inside a single institution, moving them between two clients of the same bank. Between different banks, it is harder, because the token stays a claim on the bank that issued it and cannot simply become money on Bank B’s balance sheet. The two must first agree on what changed on their books and how the debt settles. Swift is positioning its ledger as where that coordination happens, though it is only one approach among several. The BIS’ Project Agorá, The Clearing House, and others are building alternative architectures for the same problem.

Nine months in: The milestone comes nine months after Swift unveiled the project at Sibos in Frankfurt. Behind the scenes, however, several people familiar with the work told Blockstories the platform remains a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), with scalability still some way off.

What the ledger actually does: The ledger records and synchronizes what banks owe each other, but does not itself provide the asset used for final settlement. Built on Hyperledger Besu, it sits between the banks’ own tokenized deposit systems and validates their commitments, while each bank keeps control of its keys, assets, and liquidity. Final settlement, when the interbank obligation is extinguished, still takes place through RTGS, correspondent banking, or another agreed mechanism.

Payment now, settlement later: Those settlement rails are also why timing, not speed, is the real constraint. Swift already moves fast, with 75% of payments reaching the beneficiary bank within ten minutes. Much of the remaining delay comes afterwards, before the customer is credited, particularly outside conventional settlement hours. The ledger targets that gap, letting banks act on validated commitments so funds can be made available before final settlement completes.

The risk does not disappear: However, making funds available first does not erase the risk behind it. If Bank B credits its customer before Bank A has settled, the timing gap must be covered through prefunding, reserved liquidity, collateral, or credit limits. Swift has not disclosed how this will work at scale.

Still an MVP: That unresolved gap is why people involved describe the current build as a feasibility test. The hard parts left are managing liquidity, offsetting payments against each other, and fixing the exact point a payment becomes legally final.

  • “Everyone basically agrees that what is being tested now is a technical test, but probably not very realistic as the scalable solution,” one person involved in the longer-term design discussions told Blockstories.

Why Agorá is the real contrast: Those settlement questions are what separate Swift’s design from Project Agorá’s, the highest-profile competing initiative, led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Agorá places tokenized central-bank reserves on the shared platform alongside commercial-bank deposits, letting the payment chain settle atomically. Swift’s MVP takes a narrower route, with final settlement remaining off-ledger.

  • “Agorá is further ahead on settlement because it has already tested a model using central-bank money. Swift has the advantage of being connected to the banks,” one person familiar with both initiatives told Blockstories.

The timing: Agorá also sets the clock. The BIS completed the prototype in May with seven central banks and more than 40 institutions and has said the next phase will include real-value transactions. Several sources familiar with the matter told Blockstories that Agorá has completed a further set of test transactions, with results awaiting publication, and read Swift’s announcement as an effort to get ahead of the project. Sibos returns at the end of September, this time in Miami, giving Swift reason to have a visible transaction in hand.

Outlook: Zooming out, the ledger is among Swift’s most strategic bets, but it is only one piece of a wider effort that also includes its push on ISO 20022 data standards. It arrives during a leadership reshuffle, with former Chief Innovation Officer Tom Zschach having departed. The pilots will test whether banks can sync these payments across institutions. Harder still is whether Swift can build a liquidity and risk model that actually holds up at scale.

Anjli Amin is Head of Europe at OpenFX, a cross-border payment infrastructure provider, enabling institutions and enterprises to move money globally via stablecoins.

Beyond coordination, what would it take for tokenized deposits to work at scale for cross-border payments?

Coordination is only part of the problem. A shared ledger like the one proposed by Swift can synchronize what banks have committed to do, but it cannot create the liquidity needed to complete a payment. For example, if the recipient needs Colombian pesos, someone still has to source those pesos at the right time and at the right price.

That becomes even harder in less liquid corridors. Payments may involve several banks with different funding arrangements, cut-off times, compliance checks, and processing systems. Tokenisation can improve reconciliation and reduce some hand-offs, but it does not remove the underlying FX and liquidity requirements.

Interoperability is another constraint. The model only works at scale once enough banks, payment providers, and market infrastructures can interact across compatible systems. Until then, the chain remains limited by its least modernised participant.

Finally, that network effect is difficult to achieve when incentives diverge. Correspondent banking still generates revenue through fees, liquidity provision, and access to hard-to-reach markets, giving some incumbents little reason to accelerate a shift that could compress those margins.

Jorge Antolinez Ruiz is Chief Business Officer at ioBuilders, a Madrid-based startup specializing in blockchain infrastructure for financial institutions.

If Swift coordinates the payment, how do banks settle using tokenized deposits today?

The simplest model is within a single banking group. Because subsidiaries already share the same balance sheet and risk framework, tokenized deposits can move between them without additional credit assessment.

For now, the most practical model is a bank consortium with a central clearing entity. Rather than requiring every bank to accept every other bank’s tokenized deposits directly, one institution clears the exposures between participants. That is the model we tested with five banks in Spain, and the direction gaining the most traction elsewhere.

Banks could also agree bilaterally to accept each other’s deposits within predefined limits and under a common rulebook. We have discussed that model with banks, but have not seen it reach production.

Longer term, tokenized RTGS money or wholesale CBDCs could simplify the architecture by allowing final interbank obligations to settle in central bank money, a neutral settlement asset that banks already trust. Until then, a central clearing entity is likely to remain part of the model.

  1. LCH SA Digital Asset Derivatives Clearing Rule Book (LSEG Post Trade) — This rulebook provides a behind-the-scenes look at how one of Europe's largest clearing houses is adapting its infrastructure for digital asset derivatives. It explains how crypto futures and options can be cleared under the same risk management, margining and default procedures used across traditional financial markets.

  2. Multi-issuance Stablecoins and MiCA's First Stress Test (CEPS) — The paper argues that MiCA already supports multi-issuance stablecoins despite disagreements between the ECB, European Commission and Parliament.

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Disclaimer: The information provided in the Institutional Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.

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