In a milestone for tokenized finance, a group of global financial firms has completed the first cross-border, intraday repurchase agreement (repo) using tokenized U.K. government bonds on the Canton Network — a blockchain built for institutional use. What happened - The deal used digital versions of gilts (the roughly $2 trillion U.K. government bond market) in an intraday, cross-border repo — the first time tokenized gilts have been used this way, according to a release shared with CoinDesk. - It also included the first cross-currency trade in which tokenized gilts were exchanged for tokenized deposits denominated in a currency other than the British pound. - TreasurySpring programmed interest payments and risk terms directly into the smart contracts that governed the trades. Why it matters A repo is a short-term funding tool in which one party sells a security and agrees to buy it back later (often the same day). Banks and trading firms use repos to raise intraday cash, but traditional settlement processes, batch windows and market cut-offs mean collateral movements across borders must be planned days in advance. By putting both the bond and the cash on a shared blockchain, counterparties can transfer ownership in real time and around the clock — potentially freeing up far more high-quality collateral for market use. Participants and tech The experiment brought together established market infrastructure and trading firms — LSEG, Euroclear, DTCC, Tradeweb, Citadel Securities and Société Générale — alongside digital-asset players such as Archax and Cumberland DRW. Digital Asset, the developer behind the Canton Network, led the project; it raised funding last year from financial heavyweights including Goldman Sachs, DRW, Citadel Securities, BNY and Nasdaq. Bigger picture: unlocking $300 trillion? Digital Asset’s chief business development officer, Kelly Matheison, says the Canton Network aims to make roughly $300 trillion of global high-quality liquid assets (HQLA) more usable as collateral through tokenization. Today, she notes, only about 10–11% of that pool — roughly $28 trillion — is actively used as collateral at any given time, largely due to timing and settlement frictions. Using real-time blockchain settlement could allow firms to mobilize balance sheets more efficiently and increase market activity. Bottom line This proof-of-concept doesn’t immediately change the plumbing of global markets, but it demonstrates a concrete path for institutional blockchains to squeeze inefficiencies out of short-term funding and cross-border collateral flows. If scaled, tokenized, around-the-clock settlement could significantly expand how much high-quality collateral is put to work — and reshape liquidity dynamics in fixed income and repo markets. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news