The biggest private-sector bank in Latin America, Itaú, has partnered with OpenAssets, a developer of digital asset infrastructure, to test the tokenization of investment funds and fixed-income instruments in Brazil. The Brazilian Financial and Capital Markets Association, or ANBIMA, is spearheading the project to test distributed ledger technology for the issuance, trading, and settlement of securities. OpenAssets will supply the technology required to evaluate tokenized assets inside an institutional framework, while Itaú will contribute its experience in capital markets to the initiative.
The pilot is part of a wider effort to understand how blockchain technology could be used in Brazil’s traditional financial markets.
Under the project, Itaú and OpenAssets will develop technical proofs of concept and examine the operational, compliance and technology requirements involved in tokenized financial products.
The use cases being explored include debentures and investment funds. Debentures are debt instruments commonly used by companies to raise money, while investment funds pool money from investors and invest it across different assets.
The project does not involve actual financial transactions at this stage. The tests are being conducted on a private and permissioned distributed ledger network in a simulated environment.
ANBIMA selected 20 use cases for the pilot in April from 39 proposals submitted by more than 50 banks, asset managers and technology companies. The selection shows the level of interest among Brazil’s financial industry in exploring blockchain-based market infrastructure.
For Itaú, the project provides an opportunity to examine how tokenization could work within existing capital markets processes. Instead of replacing traditional financial systems outright, tokenization could allow certain ownership and transaction records to be represented digitally on a blockchain-based network.
OpenAssets will provide the infrastructure for the experiment, while Itaú’s role will focus on the practical requirements of operating tokenized securities within an institutional financial environment.
The project will also look at compliance. This is an important part of tokenization because putting an asset on a blockchain does not remove the legal and regulatory requirements attached to that asset.
Financial institutions need to understand who owns the asset, how transfers are recorded, how transactions are settled and what investor protections apply. The pilot therefore aims to explore not just the technology but also how tokenized products could fit into existing financial-market rules.
The experiment comes as tokenized real-world assets continue to grow globally. Data from RWA.xyz showed that the value of tokenized real-world assets distributed on public blockchains had more than doubled over the previous year, rising from around $18.9 billion in August 2025 to about $38.3 billion.
US Treasury debt represented the largest category, with more than $16 billion in tokenized assets.
The growth of tokenized assets has attracted banks, asset managers and technology companies because blockchain networks could potentially make some financial transactions faster and easier to track. However, the technology also brings questions around regulation, custody, investor rights and how tokenized assets interact with existing financial infrastructure.
OpenAssets and Itaú will build tokenization proofs of concept for Brazilian capital markets
OpenAssets (@OpenAssetsInc) announced the work today as a use case inside ANBIMA’s (@ANBIMA_BR) pilot, covering architecture advice and assessment of operational and compliance… pic.twitter.com/yTpxKosisU
— BSCN (@BSCNews) August 11, 2026
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