Citi looks to create tokenized shares of private companies, WSJ says

Citigroup is exploring the development of a platform to issue tokenized shares of private companies, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal. This initiative aims to streamline the traditionally cumbersome process of private equity investment by leveraging blockchain technology to enhance liquidity and settlement speed. By tokenizing these assets, the bank intends to provide institutional clients with more efficient access to private markets that have historically suffered from fragmentation and manual processing delays. The move signifies a growing institutional appetite for integrating distributed ledger technology into core financial services to reduce operational overhead. As major financial institutions continue to experiment with RWA tokenization, this development highlights a strategic shift toward digitizing private market securities. Such efforts could fundamentally alter how private equity is traded, managed, and distributed among global investors. The potential adoption of this technology by a global systemic bank like Citi underscores the increasing legitimacy and maturity of blockchain-based financial infrastructure.