Citigroup Builds Institutional Tokenization Stack, Signaling $4T Market Shift

Published by James Harris on June 11, 2026June 11, 2026

Citigroup has launched Digital Depositary Receipts, a product that lets its wealthy and institutional clients hold blockchain-recorded securities in private companies, with Citi acting as both issuer and custodian through infrastructure operated by SIX, the Swiss market operator. The structure borrows from the decades-old depositary receipt model, adapting it so investors hold a digital receipt rather than direct equity, and the first transaction used Kaleido, a tokenization firm already backed by Citi Ventures.

The more revealing detail is what Citi is doing in parallel. Earlier this month, it joined several of the largest U.S. lenders in a plan to build a shared tokenized deposit network through The Clearing House, targeting a mid-2027 launch. That system and this product share the same underlying logic: move regulated financial instruments onto blockchain rails without actually ceding control to public infrastructure. Robinhood is already selling tokenized shares of OpenAI and SpaceX to European users, and Republic has offered similar products for years, but those are retail-facing wrappers. Citi is building institutional plumbing, which is a different kind of market signal. The 2023 forecast from Citi’s own research, projecting a $4 trillion tokenized securities market by 2030, now reads less like analysis and more like a product roadmap.

The product currently runs exclusively on SIX’s private blockchain. That is a meaningful constraint, not a technical footnote, because it keeps the entire stack inside Citi’s custody and control.

The competitive pressure here is real. JPMorgan has run its Onyx tokenized deposit network since 2020, and BlackRock’s BUIDL fund has demonstrated that tokenized Treasuries can attract institutional capital at scale, pulling in over $2.8 billion in AUM. Citi’s move into private company tokenization arrives at a moment when IPO pipelines remain uncertain and large private firms are in no hurry to go public, which concentrates demand for exactly this kind of secondary access. Regulatory clarity under the current U.S. administration has also reduced the legal risk of launching products like this domestically, which likely accelerated the timeline.

Citi has said it plans to expand to public blockchains over time, which would meaningfully change the product’s reach and, more importantly, its custody model. Whether that expansion happens before or after the tokenized deposit network goes live in 2027 will determine whether Citi ends up with a genuinely open infrastructure play or a well-branded private ledger.