On 2 November 2026, eligible corporate clients in Hong Kong gained access to tokenised bank deposits from Standard Chartered, with around-the-clock settlement between banks on Ensemble TX at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), according to the bank’s press release. Hong Kong is the group’s first market for the product.
A tokenised deposit is a regulated commercial-bank deposit represented so it can move on the bank’s own blockchain. The money remains a deposit at the bank.
Deposits on Standard Chartered’s blockchain
Standard Chartered built the blockchain this product runs on. Eligible clients can use commercial bank deposits there for treasury and investment work, including liquidity moved between companies in the same group while the funds stay on deposit at the bank. The bank pitches it to corporate treasurers, banks, investment platforms and digital-asset firms for treasury, liquidity and operations.
The product was developed with support from the HKMA’s Supervisory Incubator for Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
Ensemble TX and tokenised central bank money
Ensemble TX is the pilot phase of Project Ensemble. According to the HKMA, the pilot now settles tokenised-deposit transactions between banks in CeBM around the clock, every day of the week, so those payments can clear outside ordinary banking hours as well. Transfers of those deposits across participating banks are real time. CeBM is tokenised central bank money. It is what banks in the pilot use when they settle with each other after a tokenised-deposit transfer. Standard Chartered says that central bank money includes a wholesale (bank-to-bank) CBDC, or wCBDC.
The pilot now has 12 participating banks and 20 industry pioneers. The HKMA footnotes give examples, not the full lists. Bank examples are HSBC, ICBC (Asia), Bank of China (Hong Kong), CCB Asia, and Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong). Pioneer examples are BlackRock, China Asset Management (Hong Kong), and Ant International.
Ensemble TX started in November 2025. In that first stage, interbank settlement of the tokenised deposits went through Hong Kong’s real-time gross settlement system (RTGS) for Hong Kong dollars. The transactions carried real value and ran inside a controlled pilot. They covered tokenised deposits and digital assets. Industry pioneers used tokenised deposits from participating banks for corporate treasury work and for transactions in tokenised money market funds.
The HKMA says it will keep working with the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), Hong Kong’s securities regulator, on the setup for tokenised instruments and the market infrastructure tied to them.
China AMC, Finloop and PantherTrade
Finloop, PantherTrade, and China AMC are already running live transactions in tokenised deposits on Ensemble TX and settling tokenised money market funds there, according to Standard Chartered.
The same release says the bank is partnering with Fireblocks so that banking functions sit inside the platform and digital-asset clients have direct access. Hashkey is joining, and the bank says that widens how far the product reaches. Finloop, PantherTrade, China AMC, Fireblocks, and Hashkey are exploring institutional treasury management and links across investment activity and capital markets.
Ole Matthiessen, Standard Chartered’s global head of transaction services and digital assets, said the launch “brings digital money into practical treasury and investment workflows, supported by the trust and controls of the banking system.”
Later markets and unpublished figures
Standard Chartered says it plans to offer the product in further markets over time.
According to CoinDesk, a tokenised deposit remains money held at a bank, unlike a stablecoin issued by a private company such as Tether’s or Circle’s dollar stablecoins. A business can move the funds without turning them into a separate token. Transaction values and the number of clients with access have not been published.
