Credit where credit's due: India's tokenised bonds must now open the door to global capital

India recently completed a successful pilot of tokenized corporate bonds, with issuers REC, L&T, and IIFL Finance raising a combined Rs 1,025 crore within a single week. These transactions utilized a permissioned distributed ledger and wholesale CBDC to achieve atomic settlement, effectively eliminating traditional settlement risks within the existing regulatory perimeter. While this engineering milestone proves that domestic market infrastructure can be upgraded without compromising statutory protections, the current ecosystem remains a closed loop restricted to domestic participants. The lack of interoperability between conventional demat accounts and the new ledger, combined with a three-month lock-in period, currently limits liquidity and secondary market activity. The broader significance for the RWA market lies in the potential to democratize access to Indian credit for global investors who are currently priced out by high operational costs. By transitioning from domestic-only settlement to programmable, cross-border rails, India could tap into significant global stablecoin liquidity and institutional capital. Ultimately, the success of this initiative depends on enabling foreign allocators to hold Indian assets alongside US-denominated tokenized debt while maintaining regulatory compliance. This shift would transform tokenized bonds from mere digital labels into versatile instruments capable of being used in global treasury workflows and collateral arrangements.