Nine Firms Led by SMBC Complete Stablecoin Settlement Trial for Tokenized Securities

Project Trinity Phase 2 Completed

Nine Japanese financial firms, led by Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC), have completed the second phase of a trial that settles tokenized securities with a stablecoin, the group announced on Oct 6. The experiment, known as Project Trinity, tested delivery-versus-payment settlement, a mechanism that exchanges a security and its payment at the same moment so neither party is left holding one side of an unfinished trade. The group framed the completion as progress toward production-grade settlement infrastructure for Japan's digital securities market. The problem the trial addresses is structural. In today's digital-securities trading, the transfer of a security and the payment for it do not always complete simultaneously. When one leg finishes first, the counterparty can default, and the waiting party loses principal. Delivery versus payment, or DvP, closes that gap by executing both legs together. For the cash leg, the trial used a stablecoin pegged in value to legal tender rather than a volatile crypto asset. Phase 2 ran from April through September 2026 and simulated trading between Daiwa Securities and SBI Securities. Two trades were settled on START, the tokenized-security market operated by Osaka Digital Exchange. SBI VC Trade issued the tokenized corporate bonds serving as the securities, while SMBC issued a trust-type stablecoin for the payment side. Infrastructure came from two specialists. Progmat built the issuance and management layer for the tokenized securities, and Progmat together with Datachain supplied the technology that connects securities tokens and payment tokens living on separate blockchains, an omnichain problem, since each chain may run its own consensus mechanism. The scope went beyond clean settlement. The participants also tested purchasing and redeeming the stablecoin, and rehearsed two failure modes: a payment account short of stablecoin balance, and a trade whose details do not match between the two sides. The group reported that results met expectations within the assumed range across every scenario tested.

From Deposit Tokens to Stablecoins

The stablecoin cash leg is what separates this round from earlier work. In April, six firms including SBI Securities and Daiwa Securities completed a separate DvP trial that settled tokenized securities with DCJPY, a payment token built on tokenized bank deposits. That experiment validated the settlement design itself. The new phase swapped the cash instrument, moving payment to a stablecoin, the asset class Japanese banks have been positioning for everyday institutional use. The change is small on paper and consequential in practice: a deposit token represents money already sitting in a bank account, while a trust-type stablecoin is issued and redeemed against trust assets held at the issuing bank. Both trials converge on the same target. The group set T+2 settlement, meaning DvP executes two business days after trade agreement, as its near-term goal, and said it had confirmed to a certain extent that this form of settlement is achievable. The phrasing stops short of a production commitment, and the announcement named no timetable for a next phase. Market structure also differs from public crypto venues. START is a regulated securities market, so matching there works nothing like the public order book of a crypto exchange; orders, eligible counterparties and settlement rules all sit inside a permissioned framework. The group did not disclose which chain environments carried the trial tokens, and no public mainnet network was named in the release. What phase 2 added is stress coverage. Beyond completing two clean trades, the participants verified how the flow behaves when a stablecoin balance runs short and when trade details reported by the two counterparties diverge. Those edge cases decide whether automated DvP settlement can operate without manual reconciliation, and the group judged its results satisfactory within the assumed scope.

Why the Cash Leg Choice Matters

Read together, the two trials describe how Japanese institutions are choosing their settlement stack. The DvP design removes principal risk at settlement, which is an operational failure mode entirely distinct from the liquidation risk a leveraged crypto trader carries when prices move against margin. The more telling choice is the cash leg: rather than routing settlement through public-chain tokens, the banks tested a stablecoin they issue and control themselves, on permissioned rails, with T+2 as the stated milestone. COINOTAG's read of the Oct 6 announcement is that production timelines, not technology, are now the open question.