Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group has begun a proof of concept for on-chain repurchase-agreement trading in Japanese government bonds, bringing together four group companies — MUFG Bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities, Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking, and MUFG itself — with three technology partners.
Digital Asset is providing the Canton Network-based tokenisation framework underpinning the PoC. Progmat is supporting market-practice analysis and product design. Secured Finance is supplying a lending protocol intended to cover the full repo lifecycle: trade agreement, opening-leg settlement, valuation, collateral management and closing-leg settlement. The stated goal is real-time, atomic settlement of JGB repo transactions — where the bond and cash legs exchange simultaneously rather than in separate steps carrying settlement risk.
No transaction value has been disclosed for the PoC, which MUFG expects to conclude by the end of 2026. A potential commercial rollout, if the PoC succeeds, is pencilled in for fiscal years 2027-29 — putting any live product some way off, but the participation of one of Japan's largest banking groups across four business lines signals serious institutional intent behind Canton-based repo infrastructure.
The JGB repo market is one of the largest and most liquid government-bond financing markets globally, and reducing settlement risk in that market has long been a target for distributed-ledger proponents. MUFG's PoC adds a major Japanese institutional voice to a growing list of banks and market-infrastructure providers — including DTCC and Broadridge in the US — testing Canton-based repo and collateral workflows in 2026.