Brazil’s largest bank, Itaú Unibanco, has joined a landmark tokenization pilot that aims to bring bonds and investment funds onto blockchain rails, marking another decisive step in the country’s push to modernize its capital markets with distributed-ledger technology.
The initiative is run by ANBIMA, the Brazilian Financial and Capital Markets Association, and already involves more than 50 financial and capital-market institutions. Within this broad program, Itaú is collaborating with digital-asset infrastructure firm OpenAssets on a structured use case focused on tokenized fixed-income securities and investment funds.
OpenAssets announced on August 11 that it is working with Itaú to design and test the technical backbone needed for regulated tokenized investments in Brazil. The partnership will build proofs of concept and evaluate how architecture, standards, and compliance frameworks must evolve so that traditional securities can be issued, traded, and settled on distributed-ledger networks without breaking existing regulatory rules.
At the core of the pilot is a full life-cycle examination of capital-market products on blockchain systems. The program begins at issuance, then moves through secondary trading and settlement, and finally into post-trade processes such as custody and asset management. Rather than launching a new crypto-style product for retail investors, the focus is on migrating familiar instruments-bonds and funds-into a tokenized environment while keeping them within established financial norms.
On the fixed-income side, the pilot includes debentures, a widely used form of corporate debt in Brazil that companies issue to raise long-term funding. These instruments currently rely on legacy infrastructure for issuance and recording of ownership. Tokenization tests will explore whether blockchain-based records can streamline those processes, reduce reconciliation errors, and accelerate settlement times.
Investment funds form the second major pillar of the trial. Funds have different ownership structures, liquidity profiles, and operational rules compared with corporate bonds, so they provide a useful test case for how flexible tokenization standards need to be. Participants will examine whether distributed-ledger records can support routine actions such as subscriptions, redemptions, fee calculations, and reporting across diverse fund types.
Beyond building technology prototypes, OpenAssets and Itaú are also acting as advisors for the broader ANBIMA initiative. They are helping define a reference tokenization architecture and common standards that other institutions could adopt, including rules on identity, asset representation, interoperability, and auditability. Their work also extends into operational and compliance requirements, such as how to integrate know-your-customer checks, anti-money laundering controls, and regulatory reporting into tokenized workflows.
The ANBIMA program is explicitly designed to measure both the potential benefits and the frictions that may arise when existing securities are moved onto blockchain platforms. More than 50 participating institutions are mapping out possible efficiency gains-such as shorter settlement cycles, lower back-office costs, and improved transparency-while documenting technical limitations, governance issues, and legal uncertainties that appear along the way.
Instead of creating isolated experiments that exist outside the regulated system, the pilot is testing tokenization models that banks, asset managers, and other supervised entities could realistically adopt. This means examining how current legal definitions of ownership, custody, and settlement translate into token form and ensuring that tokenized securities can coexist with traditional book-entry systems used across the industry.
Gabor Gurbacs, chairman and CEO of OpenAssets, described the partnership with Itaú as an effort to show how tokenized assets can be issued, settled, and managed in line with the strict frameworks that established financial institutions require. He characterized Brazil as a forward-looking market that is well positioned to shift tokenization from a purely exploratory phase into real-world, production-scale use.
Itaú’s involvement is central to that ambition. The bank is Latin America’s largest by market capitalization, according to data cited in the announcement, and is also ranked by S&P Global as the region’s biggest lender by assets, with more than 562 billion dollars on its balance sheet. It serves both individuals and corporations in Brazil and operates through multiple brands and partnerships domestically and abroad. Its participation effectively brings a full-service universal bank-with deep experience in deposits, lending, investment products, and capital-market operations-into the heart of the tokenization experiment.
This is not Itaú’s first foray into digital assets and blockchain infrastructure. The bank has been building capabilities around tokenized securities, blockchain-based systems, and digital custody services, alongside several other major Brazilian institutions. Other large players cited as active in the country’s institutional digital-asset ecosystem include Bradesco, Santander Brasil, BTG Pactual, Banco do Brasil, Banco BV, and the development bank BNDES, highlighting how broad the interest has become among traditional financial firms.
Brazil’s stock-exchange operator, B3, has also explored ways distributed ledgers could be integrated into capital-market processes. By bringing banks, market infrastructure providers, and exchange operators into connected pilots, Brazilian stakeholders can examine each link in the securities chain-from primary issuance and custody to trading, clearing, and final settlement-within a tokenized environment.
Itaú has already gained practical experience in this area through Drex, the central bank-led project for a digital currency and tokenization platform. In 2023, the Central Bank of Brazil selected Itaú and other institutions to participate in Drex’s pilot, which tested how tokenized money and tokenized financial assets could circulate on a shared infrastructure. Lessons learned there now feed into the ANBIMA program, particularly around interoperability, security, and regulatory alignment.
Private-sector initiatives are moving in parallel. In July 2025, securitization company VERT Capital announced plans to tokenize up to 1 billion dollars in debt and receivables on the XDC Network, signaling that corporate funding tools are also shifting toward blockchain formats. Around the same time, Mercado Bitcoin indicated that it aimed to tokenize approximately 200 million dollars in fixed-income and equity products using the XRP Ledger, targeting both institutional and qualified investors.
Tokenization has started to penetrate agricultural finance as well. In the southern state of Paraná and other farming regions, pilot projects have explored how tokenized credit instruments and receivables can provide new funding channels for producers. By representing agricultural loans and future crop sales as digital tokens, stakeholders are testing whether small and medium-size farmers can gain faster access to working capital while giving investors a more transparent view of underlying risks.
The OpenAssets platform sits at the center of many of these developments. The company recently raised 10 million dollars to build tokenization infrastructure tailored to regulated institutions. Its tools are designed to let banks and asset managers create, manage, and settle tokenized versions of bonds, funds, and other financial instruments without abandoning existing compliance obligations or operational processes.
While Brazil is emerging as a leader in large-scale tokenization pilots, institutions in the United States are also experimenting with regulated models. There, banks, broker-dealers, and market utilities have been running controlled tests that keep tokenized assets within legal frameworks for securities and payments. These experiments typically focus on permissioned blockchain networks, tight identity controls, and adherence to existing securities rules, mirroring the cautious but progressive approach now visible in Brazil.
For the Brazilian market, the Itaú-OpenAssets-ANBIMA collaboration could serve as a template for how tokenization might be rolled out nationally. If the pilot proves that bonds and funds can operate reliably on blockchain infrastructures, regulators and industry bodies will be better equipped to draft guidelines and standards for wider adoption. That, in turn, could open the door to tokenized versions of other assets, from real-estate certificates and infrastructure debentures to export receivables and structured products.
Market participants are especially focused on potential gains in settlement and post-trade processing. Today, many securities transactions in Brazil still involve multiple intermediaries, manual reconciliations, and settlement cycles that can stretch over days. By placing ownership records and settlement instructions on a shared ledger, institutions hope to reduce counterparty risk, cut operational costs, and improve liquidity management, particularly for fixed-income markets that remain relatively fragmented.
Another key question for the pilot is interoperability-both between different blockchain networks and between blockchain-based and traditional systems. Large incumbents like Itaú need tokenized solutions that integrate with their core banking platforms, risk systems, and reporting tools. The ANBIMA program provides a setting where these integration challenges can be addressed collectively, rather than in isolated, proprietary projects.
The initiative is also expected to influence how custody and investor protection will work in a tokenized environment. Determining who is legally responsible for safeguarding tokenized assets, how private keys are secured, and how investors are compensated in case of operational failures are all critical topics on the agenda. Established institutions bring decades of experience with custody and trustee services, which can help shape robust safeguards around digital representations of securities.
Over the longer term, successful pilots like this could reshape how global investors access Brazilian assets. Tokenized debentures and funds, for example, might eventually be more easily distributed to international investors on compliant platforms, potentially broadening the investor base for Brazilian issuers. From the perspective of domestic investors, tokenization could enable smaller minimum investment sizes and more flexible trading hours, provided regulation allows it.
For now, the Itaú-led pilot remains focused on the foundational work: validating technology, clarifying standards, and ensuring that tokenization occurs inside a clear regulatory perimeter. But with major banks, exchanges, and infrastructure providers all at the table, Brazil is positioning itself as one of the most advanced laboratories in the world for turning the theory of tokenized finance into practical, large-scale reality.