HSBC's Global Payments Solutions unit has completed a pilot issuing and settling tokenised deposits on the Canton Network, marking the bank's first use of a public blockchain for the service.
HSBC has issued its tokenised deposits on a public blockchain for the first time, completing a pilot on the Canton Network that simulated the full lifecycle of its Tokenised Deposit Service — from issuance through transfer to atomic settlement against other digital assets.
The pilot, announced on 13 April, was run through HSBC's Global Payments Solutions unit and represents a quiet but consequential shift for a bank that has until now kept its tokenisation experiments confined to private, permissioned infrastructure. Canton — a public network designed specifically for regulated institutions, with configurable privacy baked into its architecture — gave HSBC a way to test interoperability without the compliance headaches that come with deploying on a fully open chain like Ethereum.
What HSBC tested matters more than the fact that it tested anything at all. The pilot demonstrated atomic settlement: tokenised deposits moving simultaneously with other digital assets on Canton-enabled applications, with both legs of the transaction settling in a single operation or not at all. That eliminates the settlement risk that plagues traditional cross-border payments, where one party's funds can sit in limbo while the counterparty's leg clears through a different system on a different timeline.
HSBC's TDS converts corporate clients' fiat deposits into digital tokens on a 1:1 basis and transfers them instantly on HSBC's ledger. The service already supports five currencies — USD, GBP, EUR, HKD, and SGD — and is designed to give corporate treasurers 24/7, real-time settlement and programmable payment capabilities. Manish Kohli, HSBC's head of Global Payments Solutions, said the work "highlights how tokenisation is evolving within the banking sector and the infrastructure needed to support it at scale."
The choice of Canton is telling. The network positions itself as an alternative to both fully public chains and the walled-garden approach of enterprise blockchains that proved largely pointless in the 2019–2022 era. Canton uses a directed acyclic graph structure rather than a traditional blockchain, offering what its developers call "sub-transaction privacy" — meaning counterparties in a settlement see only the data relevant to their leg of the trade, while the network still validates the overall transaction's integrity.
HSBC isn't the only major institution exploring this territory. Hong Kong's monetary authority recently granted its first stablecoin licences to HSBC and Standard Chartered-led Anchorpoint, and the tokenisation of traditional financial instruments has accelerated sharply in 2026; Amundi and Spiko's tokenised SAFO fund pulled in $400 million in just three weeks. Singapore's MAS has launched its own tokenised government bills pilot settled via wholesale CBDC. The direction is clear enough: institutional finance is moving on-chain, and the remaining question is which rails it will use.
The Canton pilot also arrives days after HSBC expanded TDS to the United States, connecting global liquidity across what the bank described as "key financial markets." That US expansion had been expected since late 2025 but was delayed — reportedly by internal compliance reviews related to the bank's obligations under its 2012 deferred prosecution agreement, which only fully expired last year.
For the broader tokenisation thesis, the HSBC pilot carries weight precisely because it's boring. This isn't a crypto-native protocol issuing synthetic assets to yield farmers. It's one of the world's largest banks testing whether real deposits, denominated in real currencies, can settle atomically against other institutional-grade digital assets on shared infrastructure. If the answer is yes — and the pilot suggests it is — then the plumbing of cross-border corporate payments looks materially different within five years.
The bank has not disclosed a timeline for moving TDS onto Canton in production. A spokesperson said the pilot "demonstrated the feasibility" of the approach but that further work was needed on regulatory alignment across jurisdictions before a live deployment.
