Validating interbank payments with tokenized deposits
Cecabank
Cecabank is Spain's leading wholesale bank, specialising in securities services, treasury, payments and technology for financial institutions. Its client base spans banks, savings banks, corporates, insurance companies and public sector institutions, both in Spain and internationally, with offices in Madrid, London and Frankfurt.
Context
Cecabank, together with its shareholder banks ABANCA, Ibercaja, Kutxabank and Unicaja, wanted to explore the possibility of transforming interbank payments through tokenized deposits, given that traditional transfers between banks depend on batch processing cycles, correspondent banking relationships and settlement windows that limit availability outside standard banking hours.
Deposit transfers between different banks typically require multiple intermediary systems, introducing delays and operational friction into a process that clients increasingly expect to be instant.
Multi-bank scenarios add a further layer of complexity, as each additional counterparty extends the reconciliation steps needed to confirm that a transfer has settled.
The challenge was to validate, in a controlled environment and with a deliberately bounded scope, whether tokenized deposits could preserve the legal, regulatory and accounting nature of a traditional bank deposit while unlocking the automation and near-instant finality that digital money can offer, without requiring each bank to build its own isolated solution.
Asseto enabled the tokenization of deposit and payment coordination
With Asseto as the tokenization platform, the participating entities completed the first multi-bank proof of concept for tokenized deposits in Spain, built on interbank payments as the initial use case, a deliberately bounded scenario chosen to validate the full lifecycle of a tokenized deposit, issuance, transfer and redemption.
Multi-bank coordination
Cecabank acted as the integrating and orchestrating entity, managing the technical accounts that back the tokens, providing the cloud infrastructure on which the solution was deployed, and executing the netting between accounts. Each shareholder bank operated as an issuer and receiver, funding its own technical account and placing operation orders without managing private keys directly.
Regulatory alignment
The tokenized deposits preserved the legal, regulatory and accounting nature of a traditional bank deposit throughout the proof of concept, continuing to count towards Basel III liquidity and capital ratios, remaining eligible for Deposit Guarantee Fund coverage, and keeping the contractual relationship between each bank and its clients unchanged.
Technical architecture
The solution was structured across three coordinated layers, a restricted-access DLT network (HashSphere, built on Hedera's Hashgraph consensus), the Asseto tokenization platform, and Cecabank's technical accounts and settlement model.
Segregation by design
Cecabank configured an independent entity within Asseto for each participating bank, with its own institutional wallets, authenticated users and visibility over its own balances and transactions, so that each bank could operate on the shared network and platform without access to any other participant's information.
Issuance
Issuance began when a bank funded its technical account, triggering token minting once the platform validated sufficient balance.
Transfers
Transfers were executed once the custody module signed the transaction and the smart contract validated the sender's balance, with simultaneous netting between the technical accounts of both entities.
End to end
Redemption closed the cycle, with the smart contract irreversibly burning the tokens and releasing the corresponding backing funds to the receiving bank's operating account.
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