Overview
- DBS and Citi completed a weekend Singapore–to–U.S. U.S. dollar payment on Saturday that settled in minutes on Swift’s Digital Ledger, demonstrating tokenized deposits can move value outside normal banking hours.
- Swift’s Digital Ledger acts as an orchestration layer that sequences and validates tokenized deposit instructions while final settlement and compliance checks remain on existing bank rails and systems.
- The transfer used bank-issued tokenized deposits that remain liabilities on issuers’ balance sheets and differ from public stablecoins by keeping credit, compliance and risk controls inside banks.
- The transaction was part of Swift’s controlled pilot of 17 banks and the firms did not disclose the payment amount, customer or fees, leaving production timetables, pricing and capacity unresolved.
- Wider use will hinge on operational and regulatory fixes such as sanctions screening, FX and liquidity management, and bank readiness for recurring corporate flows as parallel U.S. work targets a 2027 rollout.