Brazil’s largest lender, Itaú Unibanco, is moving deeper into asset tokenization, joining an industry pilot that will test how bonds and investment funds can be issued, traded and settled using blockchain-based infrastructure.
Itaú has partnered with digital-asset infrastructure provider OpenAssets for the initiative, which is being coordinated by Brazil’s Financial and Capital Markets Association, ANBIMA. The pilot will focus on tokenized fixed-income securities and investment funds and will operate in a controlled, simulated environment rather than immediately offering blockchain-based securities to the public.
The project is designed to examine whether distributed ledger technology can handle several stages of a security’s lifecycle—including issuance, secondary-market trading and settlement—while remaining compatible with Brazil’s existing capital-market structure.
Itaú will contribute its capital-markets expertise, while OpenAssets will provide the underlying tokenization technology. The tests will use a private, permissioned distributed ledger, allowing participants to experiment with blockchain settlement without exposing transactions to an unrestricted public network.
For Brazil, the involvement of Itaú gives the experiment considerable institutional weight. Itaú is not simply a crypto-native company experimenting with tokenized assets; it is Brazil’s largest bank and Latin America’s largest private-sector bank by assets.
Tokenization Targets the Plumbing of Capital Markets
The pilot is less about creating new cryptocurrencies than changing how conventional financial assets move. A traditional bond transaction can involve issuers, exchanges, brokers, custodians, clearing houses and settlement infrastructure, with different institutions maintaining their own records of ownership and transactions.
Tokenization can potentially place representations of those securities onto a shared ledger, allowing ownership changes and settlement events to be synchronized across participating institutions. The ANBIMA pilot will specifically test issuance, trading and settlement, making it an infrastructure experiment rather than simply a proof of concept showing that a bond can be represented as a digital token.
If successful, the technology could reduce reconciliation requirements between financial institutions, automate portions of asset servicing and shorten settlement times. Programmable securities could eventually also automate events such as interest payments, redemptions or ownership restrictions.
Investment funds present another potentially significant application. Tokenized fund units could make subscriptions, redemptions and transfers easier to reconcile while allowing fund ownership records to interact with other digital financial infrastructure.
The pilot does not mean Itaú is immediately moving its existing bond or fund businesses onto blockchain. The program remains experimental, and commercial deployment would depend on technical performance, regulatory requirements and the willingness of other market participants to adopt compatible infrastructure.
That cautious approach reflects how institutional tokenization is developing globally: banks are increasingly interested in blockchain technology without necessarily embracing the permissionless structure associated with cryptocurrencies.
Brazil Emerges as a Major Tokenization Test Market
Itaú’s participation also fits into a broader digital-asset expansion at the bank. In September 2025, Itaú Asset Management created a dedicated crypto-asset management unit, describing it as the first initiative of its kind among Brazil’s major asset managers. Itaú Asset is the country’s largest private asset manager.
The bank has also been tracking the rapid convergence between blockchain networks and conventional capital markets. Itaú Asset noted earlier this year that tokenized US Treasuries had expanded approximately sixfold and highlighted initiatives involving tokenized equities and securities trading on public blockchains.
The new ANBIMA experiment brings that trend directly into Brazil’s domestic capital-market infrastructure. It also arrives as tokenized real-world assets become a substantially larger part of the crypto economy. Current industry estimates cited alongside the Itaú announcement put the tokenized RWA market at roughly $38.3 billion, more than double its size a year earlier, with tokenized US Treasury products representing one of its largest components.
Internationally, the competition is accelerating. NYSE is developing infrastructure for tokenized securities and blockchain settlement in the US, while Coinbase recently secured regulatory approval in Abu Dhabi for an international tokenized-securities hub. Banks, asset managers and market-infrastructure providers are increasingly testing whether bonds, funds and equities can retain their traditional legal protections while gaining the settlement and programmability benefits of blockchain technology.
Itaú’s move suggests Brazil intends to participate in that transition rather than wait for tokenization standards to be established elsewhere.
The immediate objective remains modest: test whether bonds and investment funds can be issued, traded and settled effectively on distributed-ledger infrastructure inside a controlled environment.
But the institution conducting the experiment makes it significant. When Brazil’s largest bank begins testing blockchain not for cryptocurrency trading but for the core mechanics of bonds and investment funds, tokenization moves closer to becoming capital-market infrastructure rather than a crypto-sector experiment.