Standard Chartered has launched a tokenized deposit service for corporate clients in Hong Kong, the first market in the bank's global network to offer it. The service went live November 2 on the bank's proprietary blockchain and settles between banks around the clock in central bank money.
According to the bank, the product turns regulated bank deposits into programmable tokens that corporate treasurers, banks, investment platforms and digital asset businesses can use for treasury, investment and intragroup liquidity. Tokenized deposits move between participating banks in real time. They remain money held at a bank, not stablecoins.
The service runs on the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's EnsembleTX infrastructure and was developed with support from the HKMA's Supervisory Incubator for Distributed Ledger Technology. Standard Chartered said China AMC, Finloop and PantherTrade are already executing live tokenized deposit transactions and settling tokenized money market funds through EnsembleTX. Fireblocks is partnering with the bank to embed banking capabilities in its platform, and HashKey has joined the ecosystem. The bank did not say whether the Fireblocks integration is live.
The launch coincided with an upgrade to the network itself. The HKMA said EnsembleTX now supports 24/7 settlement of tokenized deposit transactions in tokenized central bank money, including wholesale central bank digital currency. The pilot began in November 2025 with seven banks and relied on the operating hours of Hong Kong's dollar real-time gross settlement system. It now has 12 banks and 20 industry pioneers, according to The Digital Banker, which named HSBC, Standard Chartered, Bank of China (Hong Kong), China Construction Bank (Asia) and ICBC (Asia) among the banks. It remains a controlled pilot.
Standard Chartered disclosed no transaction values, deposit balances or client numbers, and it did not name its next market, saying only that it plans to expand over time.