Citi News: Citigroup Launches Crypto Platform for Tokenized Private Shares
Citigroup has introduced a new crypto platform designed to tokenize and trade shares of late-stage private companies for institutional and qualified investors. The initiative is being developed in partnership with SDX, the digital asset arm of the SIX Swiss Exchange, and will operate on a permissioned distributed ledger infrastructure.
Under the model, Citi will serve as both custodian and tokenization agent, issuing securities as regulated tokenized depositary receipts held through licensed financial institutions. The bank is already in discussions with several major private companies to onboard onto the platform.
Initially, access will be limited to non-U.S. investors, with expansion into the United States planned for a later phase pending regulatory approval. The platform targets the estimated $75 billion late-stage pre-IPO market, which has grown as major private firms like SpaceX and Anthropic delay public listings, leaving institutional investors with limited secondary liquidity options.
Citi Crypto Platform: Built on SDX and R3 Corda Infrastructure
The system runs on R3’s Corda-based permissioned distributed ledger through SDX’s central securities depository framework. Rather than using a public blockchain, it operates within the regulated infrastructure of the SIX Group, designed specifically for institutional custody, compliance, and settlement requirements.
In this structure, Citi issues tokenized depositary receipts while holding the underlying securities in custody. Distribution at launch will be facilitated through Sygnum Bank in Switzerland and SBI Digital Markets in Singapore, focusing on institutional and qualified investors across Europe and Asia.
Citi’s digital assets lead described the experience as bringing private company equity into the same environment as public stocks like Apple, effectively allowing both asset types to sit side by side in a unified investment workflow.
The platform also aims to significantly reduce settlement friction in private markets, where transactions are currently slow, manual, and dependent on fragmented cap table systems. On SDX infrastructure, Citi says these processes can be executed nearly in real time.
Tokenization Market Outlook: Wall Street Builds Toward a $5.5 Trillion Opportunity
Citi’s Tokenization 2030 report projects that tokenized real-world assets could reach $5.5 trillion by the end of the decade, rising from roughly $17 billion today. Growth is expected to be led by private equity, real estate, and money market instruments, with forecasts ranging from $2.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion depending on regulatory developments.
While institutional sentiment has been mixed recently, major financial players continue to expand infrastructure bets, signaling long-term commitment rather than short-term experimentation.
Competition in this space is accelerating. JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citi are jointly developing a tokenized deposit system through The Clearing House, targeting a 2027 rollout to compete with stablecoin-based settlement rails. Meanwhile, the New York Stock Exchange is preparing its own tokenized securities platform for late 2026, and DTCC has already begun limited production testing ahead of broader deployment.
Taken together, these initiatives show that tokenization is moving from pilot programs into production-grade financial infrastructure. Citi’s new SDX-powered platform positions the bank directly within the emerging institutional stack for private market tokenization, particularly at a time when investor demand is shifting toward private assets amid slower public listings and evolving capital flows.
