India's SEBI Settles $107 Million Tokenized Bond Pilot, Boosting Ethereum (ETH) RWA Case

SEBI Settles $107 Million in Tokenized Bonds

India has put part of its corporate bond market on distributed-ledger rails, with the securities regulator and the central bank settling a combined 10.25 billion rupees — approximately $107 million — in tokenized debt through new pilot infrastructure. Announced on Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Board of India's (SEBI) Demat 2.0 project allows corporate bonds to be issued and held as digital tokens on a ledger operated by the country's statutory depositories, with cash settlement routed through the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) over the RBI's Unified Market Interface. SEBI's official press release confirms all three debut issuances have already settled.

The first transaction came on Monday, when state-owned power financier REC raised 5 billion rupees from 18 investors. Two days later, engineering conglomerate Larsen & Toubro matched that with a 5 billion rupee issue placed with four investors, while non-bank lender IIFL sold 250 million rupees of bonds to a single participant on the same day.

The operational change is settlement speed. SEBI says issuers now receive funds on the day of bidding rather than two to three days later, because atomic settlement removes the lag between money and bond movements, while smart contracts automate interest and redemption payments — the contract-based automation that Ethereum's smart contracts carried into mainstream digital finance. Access friction stays low: investors hold the tokens in existing Demat accounts without fresh Know-Your-Customer checks, though they must enable Demat 2.0 with their depository and maintain a wholesale CBDC wallet at a participating bank. According to the regulator, India is the first jurisdiction to combine ledger-native bond issuance, depository-held ownership records and CBDC settlement inside existing regulated market infrastructure, and tokenization leaves the bonds' legal status and investor protections untouched. Earlier reports in August had pointed to an REC-only trial of under 5 billion rupees; the live pilot more than doubled that scale, with secondary trading on request-for-quote platforms and retail access planned for later phases.

Zamanat Fund Targets $250 Billion GCC Gap

The same week, a private-sector tokenization structure went live in the Gulf. On September 10, Dubai-based Zamanat announced its sponsorship of Zamanat Fund CEIC Limited, a DIFC-domiciled tokenized private credit fund with a target size of up to $100 million, aimed at the Gulf Cooperation Council's estimated $250 billion small and medium-sized enterprise financing gap. The shortfall is stark: only 11 percent of SMEs across the region currently have access to credit, and in the UAE, SMEs generate more than half of GDP and employ most of the private-sector workforce while receiving less than 10 percent of total bank lending.

The fund will deploy capital into regional private credit, a strategy its sponsors tie to national agendas including Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 and the UAE Centennial 2071. Umair Tariq, founder and CEO of Zamanat, framed the vehicle as a credible route between fundamentally sound GCC businesses that still struggle to raise growth capital and the institutional investors seeking exposure — and as the firm's first live proof point for regulated fund tokenization on ZIGChain.

Structurally, the vehicle is a closed-ended fund registered with the Dubai Financial Services Authority as an Exempt Fund classified as a Credit Fund, managed by Truleum Venture Partners Limited and administered by Apex Group. Fund interests are issued as ZM1 Investment Tokens on ZIGChain within a whitelisted environment, available only to investors meeting the DFSA's Professional Client criteria. Zamanat is backed by Disrupt.com, a MENA-based, operator-led venture builder and lead investor in the business. The launch also feeds a broader build-out: Zamanat is developing a pipeline of Digital Shariah Assets spanning private credit, receivables and real estate, targeting a global Islamic finance market projected to reach $9.7 trillion by 2029 — though the fund itself is explicitly not marketed as Shariah-compliant. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on MEXC.

Tokenization Enters Regulated Perimeters

Taken together, the two launches show tokenization stepping out of crypto-native experimentation and into statutory, regulated perimeters — India from the sovereign-infrastructure side, Dubai's DIFC from the funds side. The load-bearing document here is the regulator's own release, which states outright that no other country has yet combined DLT-native issuance, depository-maintained ownership records and CBDC settlement within a single regulated framework. In COINOTAG's reading, this institutionalizes mechanics the market already knows from JPMorgan Chase's blockchain deposit pilots, tokenized commodities such as Tether Gold (XAUT) and Ethereum tokenization rails — and, unlike the sector's earlier cross-chain bridge failures, both structures settle inside supervised legal walls. Regulators are no longer drafting whitepapers; they are running live settlement.