The Cardano Foundation says CIP-0113 is live on mainnet after independent audits, letting issuers of stablecoins and tokenized funds build identity checks, sanctions screening and seizure into the asset itself. The controls reach only tokens whose issuers adopt the standard, not ADA.
The Cardano Foundation said Wednesday that a token standard letting issuers freeze, seize and restrict the assets they issue is live on Cardano's main network. The standard, CIP-0113, puts compliance rules inside the token itself, and the ledger checks them every time the token moves.
The Foundation describes the design as a product of Cardano's extended UTXO ledger model. Compliance logic attaches to the asset rather than sitting in a separate contract a user has to route through, and the ledger enforces it on every transfer, mint and burn. CoinDesk reports that the standard works through a shared smart contract that validates transfers against the restrictions an issuer has set. No hard fork was required, so the standard arrived without the coordinated node upgrade a protocol-level change would have needed.
An issuer that adopts it can require identity verification before a recipient is eligible to hold the token, block transfers to sanctioned addresses, freeze or seize holdings to satisfy a regulatory or court order, and revise those rules as regulations change. Issuers either select modular rule sets or write their own. The Foundation says execution costs stay predictable regardless of how many inputs a transaction carries.
The reach is narrower than the description of freeze and seize powers suggests. The rules bind only tokens whose issuers choose to adopt the standard, and the Foundation names regulated stablecoins, investment funds and tokenized bonds as the intended cases. ADA itself is not covered, and neither are existing native assets whose issuers do nothing.
"Regulators have been clear about what tokenised financial assets need. The rules have to travel with the asset," said Frederik Gregaard, chief executive of the Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit that supports Cardano's development. That is a statement of what the standard is for rather than evidence that any regulator has accepted it.
Keeping the new tokens inside Cardano's existing asset model is what lets current software handle them. "On Cardano, a programmable token is still a native asset, so the whole ecosystem can work with it," said Giovanni Gargiulo, a senior blockchain architect at the Foundation. The announcement names the wallets Eternl and GeroWallet, the CardanoScan explorer and the BloxBean developer tools as already working with them.
The Swiss Capital Markets and Technology Association has recognized CIP-113 tokens as equivalent to its CMTAT standard, which the Foundation says lowers the due diligence burden on issuers of ledger-based securities. That recognition is set out here as the Foundation describes it. The association's own document was not read for this article.
The Foundation says the standard went live after multiple independent security audits, and its announcement does not name the auditors or give the dates of their reports. The specification directory could not be opened for this article either, so the mechanism is described from the announcement and the CoinDesk report rather than from the text of the standard.
Issuer control over tokens other people hold is not new, and it is being litigated now. Tether froze $344 million in USDT linked to Iran in April, and this week Conduit asked a New York federal court to rule that Tether had no right to freeze $2.76 million sitting in its operating wallet. American rules push issuers the same way: Treasury told stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act to police transactions for sanctions and money laundering.
What CIP-0113 changes is not whether an issuer can do this but how ordinary it becomes. A freeze that each issuer builds alone is a bespoke piece of code holders have to find and read. A freeze written into a published standard, audited, recognized by a Swiss industry body and supported by the wallets people already use is a default that arrives with the asset.
ADA fell 4.5% in the 24 hours after the announcement, CoinDesk reported, on a day when the wider market fell as well and bitcoin slipped below $84,000. Neither report connects the two, and nothing read for this article establishes that the standard moved the price.
The Foundation says a securities module is still being developed. Neither its announcement nor the report read for this article names an issuer that has put a regulated asset on the standard so far.
