Itaú Unibanco, Latin America’s largest financial institution, introduced on August 11, 2026 Tuesday that it’s partnering with digital asset infrastructure supplier OpenAssets to check tokenized fixed-income securities and funding funds by way of a pilot run by ANBIMA, Brazil’s monetary and capital markets affiliation.
What the Pilot Exams
The undertaking will look at how fixed-income devices corresponding to debentures and funding funds will be issued, traded, and settled utilizing distributed ledger know-how, whereas additionally working by way of the regulatory and technical requirements that banks and asset managers would wish earlier than adopting such a system extra broadly.
ANBIMA’s tokenization pilot brings collectively greater than 50 monetary and capital markets organizations to check sensible blockchain functions throughout the complete lifecycle of those devices, from issuance by way of settlement.
Itaú and OpenAssets’ collaboration particularly contains growing technical proofs of idea, offering advisory work on tokenization structure and requirements, and assessing the operational and compliance frameworks that banks would wish earlier than this type of infrastructure might transfer past pilot standing.
OpenAssets Chairman and CEO Gabor Gurbacs framed Brazil’s particular position within the effort immediately. “Brazil has been one of the crucial forward-looking markets in finance, and it’s a pure place to maneuver tokenization from exploration to manufacturing,” Gurbacs stated.
This isn’t Itaú’s first tokenization effort. The financial institution was among the many establishments Brazil’s central financial institution chosen in 2023 to take part in Drex, an earlier pilot testing blockchain-based transactions involving tokenized cash and property.
Itaú is Latin America’s largest financial institution by each whole property, with greater than $562 billion in response to S&P International, and by market capitalization in response to Bloomberg information, giving this particular partnership extra institutional weight than a equally structured pilot from a smaller lender would possibly carry.
Brazil’s Broader Tokenization Push
This partnership suits right into a wider sample of Brazilian monetary establishments experimenting with blockchain-based property.
Brazilian credit score structuring agency VERT Capital introduced plans in July 2025 to tokenize as much as $1 billion in debt and receivables on the XDC Community, whereas Brazil-based trade Mercado Bitcoin has individually outlined plans to tokenize $200 million in property, together with fixed-income and fairness devices, on the XRP Ledger. Our earlier protection of tokenized securities addresses this broader institutional development past Brazil.
Tokenization’s attain in Brazil extends properly past bank-run pilots and institutional finance. Farmers in Paraná who struggled to safe conventional financial institution loans tokenized 10 dairy cows and put the ensuing tokens up for buying and selling by way of infrastructure linked to Brazil’s B3 trade, a concrete illustration of how the identical underlying know-how establishments are testing for bonds and funds is already being utilized to far smaller-scale, non-traditional property.
Value Figuring out About OpenAssets Itself
OpenAssets raised $10 million in a funding spherical led by Latin America-focused enterprise agency Valor Capital Group, with collaborating buyers together with USDT issuer Tether and, notably, family members that based Itaú Unibanco.
OpenAssets has stated it’s growing open tokenization requirements in collaboration with the Linux Basis Decentralized Belief, positioning itself as a broader infrastructure supplier somewhat than an organization constructed round any single institutional partnership.
Tokenization has grow to be one of many extra energetic use circumstances for blockchain know-how throughout conventional finance broadly, with banks and asset managers experimenting with placing bonds, funds, personal credit score, and equities onto digital ledgers.
Citi has estimated the tokenized securities market might develop to $5.5 trillion by 2030.
What Comes Subsequent
ANBIMA’s pilot doesn’t have a hard and fast public finish date, and the initiative’s personal acknowledged scope, technical proofs of idea, advisory work, and a compliance framework evaluation recommend this part is measured in months somewhat than weeks. Itaú and OpenAssets have additionally not indicated when, or whether or not, a profitable pilot would result in any stay, commercially out there tokenized product.
What this implies for you: this pilot is explicitly framed as a take a look at of infrastructure and requirements somewhat than as a launch of a stay, investable product, so there’s nothing right here to behave on immediately but. For readers new to the Brazilian market, our information on how one can purchase and promote cryptocurrencies in Brazil covers the fundamentals that this broader institutional push builds on.