HSBC has successfully completed a pilot simulating the issuance, transfer, and atomic settlement of its Tokenized Deposit Service (TDS) on the Canton Network, the blockchain company announced on X today, April 13.
During the controlled test, HSBC's Global Payments Solutions division simulated the transfer of tokenized deposits and their atomic settlement against other digital assets on Canton-enabled applications. The pilot is intended to demonstrate interoperability across settlement rails, a feature HSBC says is central to scaling digital financial markets.
The pilot builds on the broader rollout of HSBC's TDS, which lets corporate clients convert fiat deposits into digital assets and transfer them instantly on HSBC's ledger, per the press release. The service supports USD, GBP, EUR, HKD, and SGD, and is designed to enable 24/7 real-time settlement and programmable payments across liquidity management use cases.
Canton is run by Digital Asset, which last year raised $135 million in a strategic funding round co-led by DRW and Tradeweb, with BNP Paribas, and Citadel Securities, and The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) also participating. The firm has raised nearly $600 million over nine funding rounds since it was founded in 2014.
HSBC's pilot adds to a growing list of institutional deployments on Canton in the past few months. In January, Digital Asset and Kinexys by JPMorgan unveiled plans to issue the bank’s own deposit token, JPM Coin, natively on the network.
Weeks before that, the DTCC announced a pilot to mint a subset of Treasury securities on Canton, a Layer 1 designed for banks and financial infrastructure.
Canton describes itself as a “public blockchain” with configurable privacy, a claim that has sparked pushback in crypto circles. Critics argue that Canton's validator admission process, where new entrants require a two-thirds vote from incumbent validators, makes it permissioned by definition, regardless of how the team and marketing messaging frame it.
Canton's native CC token is currently trading at approximately $0.15, with a market cap of around $5.78 billion, up nearly 5% in the past 24 hours.
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