Regulated Digital Assets & Currencies

As the financial world embraces tokenization from stablecoins to bank monies, such as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), tokenized deposits, securities, bonds, and real-world assets, we are witnessing a transformation in how the lifecycle of financial assets is being managed.

Tokenization refers to the digital representation of a business asset on the blockchain. As such, it not only introduces greater transparency and efficiency, but also opens the door to a more inclusive, secure, and innovation-driven economy. However, this shift also brings forward significant legal, business, and technical challenges, which demand enhancements to current technologies and infrastructures.

With decades of leadership in financial transaction processing, IBM combines permissioned distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), a strong open-source culture, and the deep expertise of IBM Research to tackle the most pressing challenges in decentralized trust.

Our Decentralized Trust team at IBM Research has made significant strides in this space—developing advanced protocols published in scientific journals and delivering implementations that are open-sourced under the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust initiative.

Guided by a business mindset aligned with current and future market needs, we enable the creation of differentiated, scalable, and secure infrastructures—including quantum-secure solutions—for the next generation of financial systems.

Technology stack

IBM’s software stack for digital assets and currencies, alongside innovations from IBM Research, offer both immediate solutions and the groundwork for a trusted and scalable financial future.

The software stack enables the development of highly differentiated solutions, ranging from tokenized forms of bank monies (central bank or commercial bank), digital securities or regulated liabilities, and stablecoins, all strongly connected to the blockchain ecosystem. Our stack comprises the following:

1. Programmable platform: A high-performance distributed or centralized ledger technology, capable of processing over 200,000 transactions per second, designed for the demands of regulated environments and based on Hyperledger Fabric-X, an enhanced version of Hyperledger Fabric for digital assets use cases. Fabric-X's new EVM Compatibility capability enables Ethereum smart contracts (i.e., Solidity) to be executed transparently on Fabric-X networks — without weakening either side's guarantees. The solution preserves the Fabric-X transaction flow, trust guarantees, and high performance while enabling seamless use of the Ethereum development toolchain.
Our roadmap is described in this blog post. More details are available in the article: "Fabric-X: Scaling Hyperledger Fabric for Asset Exchange" that was recently published at the SIGMOD 2026 conference.

2. Application accelerators, i.e., reusable libraries that shorten the time to value for digital asset / currency application developers:

• Privacy-respectful and regulation-compliant token exchange – powered by Panurus, our token lifecycle management framework that is also available as an open-source project under LF Decentralized Trust, this exchange enables flexible and compliant asset transfers, while protecting transactor privacy.
• Identity management aligned with self-sovereign principles — Supporting asset ownership, recovery, and accountability while preserving privacy.
• System interoperability — Facilitating smooth integration and interoperation with legacy infrastructures and public (e.g., EVM) or private DLT-based systems.

This highly innovative software stack is infrastructure-agnostic, although it is best adapted to optimally operate for full-stack security and attain even better performance gains on IBM’s hardware-based security products, such as LinuxONE. It can be combined with IBM Digital Asset Haven for key management and digital asset custody as well as with IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers for hardware-guarded compute.

IBM’s software stack differentiated capabilities

Our SW stack and system architecture includes novel enhancements of these technologies to fulfill the demanding (and sometimes contradicting) requirements imposed by central banks, commercial banks, or financial institutions in support of a variety of use cases such as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), tokenized deposits, bonds, securities, and stablecoins:

• Transactional privacy with settlement transparency and audit-support compliance.
• Transparency as a foundation of trust and security.
• Horizontal scalability up to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second with advanced resilience (no single points of failure).
• Interoperability with legacy or modern systems (e.g., EVM), as well as with complementary traditional banking operations.
• Programmability and composability of assets and applications, as well as smart contract language independence enabling the building of a system with technology agnosticism (avoiding vendor lock-in).
• Quantum readiness and agility to convert to quantum resilience while ensuring business continuity.

Hyperledger Fabric-X Github repositories

Visit our Github to find various repositories. You can also join our open community meetings to understand project workflows, stay updated on developments, and find your place in the community.

Contact information

Would you like to investigate the possibility of working or partnering with us? Please feel free to reach out!

• Elli Androulaki, lli@zurich.ibm.com, +41 44 724 86 99
• Gabi Zodik, zodik@il.ibm.com, +972 546 976 377
• Fabio Keller, fabio.keller1@ch.ibm.com, +41 79 207 64 62