New Delhi, Sept. 14 -- India has spent the past decade making money move faster. Now it wants to do the same with assets like bonds, gold and property. On 10 September, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Securities and Exchange Board of India launched Demat 2.0, a pilot project that has already seen REC Ltd, Larsen & Toubro and IIFL Finance issue tokenized bonds.

Tokenization, as with cryptocurrencies, creates digital assets that can be transferred 'atomically': an asset changes hands in the same step as its payment. Such bonds are tracked on a tightly shared online ledger, or blockchain, with institutional trades done in the wholesale e-rupee-India's central bank digital currency (CBDC). The retail e-rupee will eventually enable wider ...