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Ahmed Barakat
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Just in, Citi(Citigroup) is launching a crypto platform to tokenize and trade shares of late-stage private companies for institutional and eligible investors. Citi is partnering with SDX, the digital asset arm of SIX Swiss Exchange, on a permissioned distributed ledger infrastructure.
The bank will act as custodian and tokenization agent, issuing securities in the form of authorized tokenized depositary receipts held through regulated financial institutions. Citi says it is already in discussions with some of the largest private companies to participate.
The platform is initially restricted to foreign investors, with U.S. access planned for a later phase once regulatory conditions allow. It targets a $75 billion late-stage pre-IPO equity market that has swelled as companies including SpaceX and Anthropic delay public debuts, leaving institutional capital with no clean secondary-market route into those positions.
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Citi Crypto Tokenization Platform: SDX and Corda Infrastructure
The platform runs on R3’s Corda permissioned distributed ledger through SDX’s digital Central Securities Depositary. It is a regulated venue that sits inside the SIX Group infrastructure rather than on a public chain. It is also a fully permissioned, institution-grade blockchain stack designed to satisfy the custody, compliance, and settlement requirements of regulated financial intermediaries.
Citi issues the tokenized depositary receipts and holds the underlying securities as custodian. Distribution at launch runs through Sygnum Bank in Switzerland and SBI Digital Markets in Singapore, targeting institutional and qualified investors across Europe and Asia.
Artem Korenyuk, Citi’s global lead for digital assets enterprise alignment and services enablement, described the investor experience plainly: private-company shares sitting “right next to their Apple stock.”
Trades in late-stage private equity currently involve manual, weeks-long processing and fragmented cap-table records. On SDX’s platform, according to the bank, those trades execute near-instantaneously.
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RWA Tokenization Stakes: A $5.5 Trillion Market Is Being Built on Permissioned Rails
Citi’s own Tokenization 2030 report puts the base-case size of tokenized real-world assets at $5.5 trillion by 2030, up from $17 billion today, with private markets, real estate, and money-market funds leading the growth.
The range runs from $2.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion, depending on regulatory velocity. Institutional demand signals have been mixed in recent months, which makes Citi’s structural commitment to tokenization infrastructure more notable, not less.
The competition is direct. JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citi are jointly developing a tokenized deposit network through The Clearing House, targeted for H1 2027, to compete with stablecoins on settlement rails.
NYSE has a tokenized securities platform planned for late 2026. DTCC ran limited production trades in July 2026 with full service from October.
Wall Street is not piloting tokenization anymore; it is building production infrastructure, and the Citi–SDX platform is the first institutional-grade on-ramp to private equity within that emerging stack.
The pre-IPO angle sharpens the commercial logic. Institutional appetite for alternative assets has shifted as traditional corporate crypto purchases have softened, pushing yield-seeking capital toward private-market exposure. Citi is positioning tokenized private company shares directly into that gap.
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