Itaú Partners With OpenAssets to Trial Asset Tokenization in Brazil

Itaú, the largest private bank in Latin America, has teamed up with digital asset infrastructure firm OpenAssets to take part in an industry pilot testing the tokenization of fixed-income securities and investment funds in Brazil.

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The pilot is organized by the Brazilian Financial and Capital Markets Association, which is examining how distributed ledger technology could support the issuance, trading and settlement of capital markets instruments. As part of the effort, Itaú and OpenAssets will build technical proofs of concept and study the compliance, operational and technology needs for tokenized assets, with debentures and investment funds among the areas under review.

OpenAssets will supply the tokenization infrastructure while Itaú brings its capital markets expertise to test how these assets could fit into institutional systems. The trials run on a private, permissioned network in a simulated setting, with no real financial transactions involved.

The pilot follows a broader surge in tokenized real-world assets, which have more than doubled in value over the past year, with US Treasury debt making up the largest share of that growth.