The Hong Kong Monetary Authority said on November 2 that EnsembleTX, the pilot phase of Project Ensemble, can now settle tokenised deposit transactions between banks in tokenised central bank money around the clock — ending the dependence on conventional banking hours that had constrained the rail since it launched a year earlier.
The upgrade lifts the number of participating banks to 12 and industry pioneers to 20 — 32 institutions in total on a settlement rail that began as a controlled pilot in November 2025, when it still leaned on Hong Kong’s HKD Real Time Gross Settlement system for the interbank leg. The HKMA said the new capability lets participating institutions “leverage tokenised CeBM for the timely settlement of tokenised transactions beyond conventional operating hours, helping to meet the needs of an increasingly global and always-on digital financial market.”
What actually changed
The distinction that matters is where the settlement asset comes from. Under the pilot’s first phase, banks moved tokenised deposits against each other and the interbank leg cleared through the existing HKD RTGS system — functional, but bound to the operating windows of a system built for a previous generation of payments. Tokenised central bank money changes the asset on that leg: the central bank’s own liability is issued on the same rail as the commercial bank tokens, so settlement no longer waits for the RTGS window to open.
The vocabulary is worth unpacking because it is easy to blur. A tokenised deposit is a claim on a commercial bank, issued as a transferable token. Tokenised CeBM is a claim on the central bank. Putting both on the same 24/7 rail is what allows a corporate treasury transfer, a tokenised money fund subscription or a securities trade to settle at 3am on a Sunday without either counterparty taking on unsecured exposure to the other while they wait for a payment window.
The HKMA frames the next stage as commercialisation rather than experimentation. It said EnsembleTX will “further facilitate the scaling of transactions and the exploration of more impactful tokenisation use cases,” and that it will keep working with the Securities and Futures Commission to build a “supportive and coordinated environment” for tokenised market infrastructure.
Who is on the rail
The numbers are small enough to count individually. Twelve banks now participate, five of them named in the release: Bank of China (Hong Kong), China Construction Bank (Asia), Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (Asia), Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) and HSBC. The other seven are not disclosed. On the industry side, 20 pioneers are involved, three of them named: Ant International, BlackRock and China Asset Management (Hong Kong).
That means eight of the 32 institutions on the rail are publicly identified — roughly a quarter — and the release does not say how many of the 12 banks are actually settling in tokenised CeBM today versus sitting on the participant list. The gap between “participating” and “transacting” is the first thing to watch as the HKMA publishes further updates.
The wider package
The settlement upgrade is one item inside a broader set of measures the HKMA announced at Hong Kong FinTech Week, organised around four pillars it labels DART: Data and Payment, artificial intelligence, Resilience and Tokenisation. Alongside the EnsembleTX change, the authority said it had completed trial trades involving Recognised Dealers conducting secondary market transactions of tokenised Exchange Fund Bills — extending the rail from interbank deposits into secondary and repo trading — and that it will soon widen the trials to include regulated stablecoins.
That sequencing is deliberate. Exchange Fund Bills are short-dated paper issued by the HKMA itself, which makes them the cleanest possible test asset for a central-bank-settled rail: the issuer, the settlement asset and the supervisor are the same institution, so a failure in the trial is a failure in a controlled environment rather than a market event. Stablecoins are the harder test, because the issuer of the token is then a third party operating under a separate licensing regime.
The regulator’s case
Eddie Yue, chief executive of the HKMA, put the timeline in blunt terms: “In just two years, Project Ensemble has transitioned from experimentation and piloting to a new phase focused on promoting the commercialisation of tokenisation applications in Hong Kong. The swift yet incremental upgrade of the infrastructure demonstrates the HKMA’s determination to foster the development of the tokenisation ecosystem in Hong Kong.”
He added an observation that reads as a signal to banks still deciding whether to build: “As the market continues to evolve, a trend is emerging in the launch of tokenised deposits by banks worldwide. Looking ahead, we anticipate that the commercialisation of tokenised deposits and digital assets will gain momentum.”
Julia Leung, chief executive of the SFC, framed the change as a liquidity story rather than a technology one: “Tokenised deposits can now power around-the-clock transactions, including corporate treasury management and secondary trading of tokenised funds on licensed platforms, galvanising market liquidity and supporting investors’ risk management.”
What 24/7 does not solve
Three constraints sit outside the settlement rail’s reach. The first is legal finality across jurisdictions: a tokenised CeBM settlement is final in Hong Kong, but the corporate treasurers the product targets operate across borders, and the HKMA’s release does not address how a 3am settlement in Hong Kong is treated by a counterparty’s home regulator. The second is the depth of the tokenised fund market that is supposed to justify round-the-clock settlement — secondary trading of tokenised funds on licensed platforms is a capability the SFC describes as now possible, not as already liquid.
The third is participation. Standard Chartered launched its own tokenised deposit product on the same day, running on the same EnsembleTX infrastructure, with five named counterparties. That parallel launch is the clearest evidence that the HKMA’s rail now has a commercial product on top of it; it is also a reminder that the number of institutions moving real money remains in the dozens, not the thousands.
The comparison to the tokenisation of securities markets is instructive. The DTCC’s tokenisation service went live in late October with 34 securities and 20 Wall Street firms — a similar order of magnitude, in a market with vastly more assets to tokenise. Both projects have crossed from demonstration to production; neither has yet crossed from production to scale.
This article is not intended as financial advice. Educational purposes only.
