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Moving US dollars between Singapore and the United States on a Saturday used to be about as likely as getting your bank on the phone at 3 a.m. That changed on September 5, 2026, when DBS Bank and Citigroup completed the first successful weekend cross-border USD payment using tokenized deposits on a blockchain-based digital ledger built by Swift.
The transaction settled in minutes. The traditional timeline for the same transfer: two business days, assuming nobody took a holiday.
How tokenized deposits made it happen
Both banks converted traditional deposits into tokenized representations on Swift’s blockchain ledger, allowing value to move between institutions without waiting for the conventional correspondent banking chain to wake up on Monday morning.
The tokenized deposits never leave the issuing banks’ balance sheets. Unlike stablecoins or other crypto-native tokens, these tokenized deposits sit within the existing regulatory and risk management framework that banks already operate under.
For corporate treasurers, funds that previously sat idle over weekends or overnight, trapped by batch processing schedules and timezone mismatches, can now be deployed in real time. In industries like e-commerce, where transactions don’t pause because a bank in New York closed for the day, that liquidity agility matters enormously.
Citi Token Services already processes approximately $1 billion in transactions weekly. DBS launched its own Token Services platform in 2024. The weekend settlement was a convergence of both institutions’ investments in blockchain-native payment rails.
Swift’s 17-bank pilot and the bigger picture
This transaction emerged from a broader proof-of-concept phase that Swift initiated in July 2026, following a design period earlier that year. The pilot includes 17 banks testing 24/7 tokenized deposit payments on Swift’s digital ledger.
Alongside DBS and Citi, institutions including ANZ, BNP Paribas, HSBC, and UBS are all piloting the solution.
DBS holds the distinction of being the only Asian bank in Swift’s core design group for the digital ledger.
Citi’s existing 24/7 USD Clearing operation already serves over 300 bank clients globally.
Swift isn’t trying to displace the existing correspondent banking network. It’s trying to make it faster by adding a blockchain-based settlement layer on top.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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