A cross-border repurchase agreement settling tokenised UK government bonds against non-GBP tokenised deposits completed on Canton in February, marking the first cross-currency transaction of its kind, according to HM Treasury's latest report.
Digital asset settlement has moved from theoretical infrastructure to executed trades. The Treasury documented the transaction in an official report, treating it as concrete evidence that wholesale markets regulators and central banks regard the technical barriers as resolved.
Canton is a blockchain platform developed by Digital Asset, a company backed by institutional investors including Jefferies, Nomura, and Barclays. The platform has become a testing ground for central bank digital currencies and tokenised settlement among major financial institutions. In February, the network processed the repo without requiring new infrastructure or regulatory waivers, according to Canton's account of the transaction.
The Treasury report, published in July, documented Canton's cross-currency work as part of a broader assessment of tokenisation readiness across UK wholesale markets. The Treasury had assembled a 54-firm taskforce earlier in the year to evaluate and accelerate adoption of tokenised assets in repos, bonds, and funds. The February Canton transaction appeared as concrete evidence that the technical capability exists to settle cross-border transactions in real time.
No transaction size has been disclosed by either Canton or the Treasury. Participants in the repo were not named in the report's public version. The transaction settled against tokenised deposits in a non-sterling currency, establishing proof that collateral mobility across denominations, a long-standing friction point in wholesale finance, can operate on distributed ledger infrastructure without intermediaries.
Cross-currency repo settlement has historically required correspondent banking relationships and multi-step clearing, adding time and cost. Tokenisation collapses those steps into a single distributed ledger transaction. The Treasury included Canton's February execution in an official report, treating it as evidence that UK financial regulators regard the technical case for tokenised cross-border settlement as closed.