Itaú Joins ANBIMA Tokenisation Pilot With OpenAssets

Itaú Unibanco has joined an ANBIMA tokenisation pilot with OpenAssets to test fixed-income securities and investment funds on distributed-ledger rails, CoinDesk reported.

The work gives Brazil's biggest bank a direct role in an industry test for issuing, trading and settling traditional investment products through blockchain-based systems.

OpenAssets is supplying digital-asset infrastructure for the project.

The pilot is being run by the Brazilian Financial and Capital Markets Association, known as ANBIMA.

Its scope covers fixed income and funds, along with the technical standards and rules that banks and asset managers would need before using tokenised market infrastructure.

Itaú's participation adds scale to the experiment.

S&P Global figures put the São Paulo-based lender's assets at more than $562 billion, making it Latin America's largest bank by assets.

The project fits a wider Brazilian push to test regulated tokenisation beyond crypto-native venues.

In July 2025, VERT Capital set out a programme for debt and receivables worth up to $1 billion, using XDC Network rails as the issuance venue.

Mercado Bitcoin's separate plan covered a $200 million package on XRP Ledger across fixed-income and stock-linked instruments.

In Paraná, farmers turned 10 dairy cows into tradable tokens through systems tied to Brazil's B3 exchange.

Itaú had already entered the public-sector testing lane.

The bank was selected in 2023 for the Brazilian central bank's Drex pilot, which tested blockchain-based transactions involving tokenised money and assets.

OpenAssets brings its own capital history to the bank-led trial.

The company raised $10 million last year in a round led by Latin America-focused Valor Capital Group, with Tether and members of the family that founded Itaú Unibanco among the participating investors.

Gabor Gurbacs, OpenAssets chairman and chief executive, described Brazil as a forward-looking finance market and a natural place to move tokenisation from exploration toward production.

The pilot still has to define which securities, fund structures, settlement rules and participating institutions can move from a test environment into routine regulated use.