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India’s top securities regulator just made its most concrete move yet toward putting bonds on a blockchain. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) announced plans to pilot tokenised corporate bonds using digital ledger technology, with a rollout expected within six to nine months.
The announcement, made by SEBI Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey at the Care Edge Debt Market Summit in Mumbai, came paired with a second initiative: a comprehensive overhaul of disclosure requirements for listed debt securities. The goal is to bring bond disclosure norms in line with the standards already applied to equities, a shift that could reshape how India’s corporate debt market operates.
What tokenisation actually means here
Instead of bonds settling through layers of intermediaries over multiple days, tokenised bonds can settle nearly instantaneously. SEBI is betting on this to solve several chronic problems that have plagued India’s corporate bond market: limited liquidity, high transaction costs, poor traceability, and clunky manual servicing processes.
India’s corporate bond market currently sits at approximately $0.56 trillion. That represents roughly 15% of the country’s GDP.
Chairman Pandey emphasized the need for a cautious approach, citing existing technological and operational risks that come with integrating DLT into a market this size.
The disclosure overhaul
SEBI wants to align bond disclosure requirements with the standards set under its Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements (LODR) regulations, the same framework that governs equity issuers. If you’re a company issuing bonds, you’d soon have to tell investors roughly the same amount of information you’d share if you were issuing stock. That means more frequent reporting, more granular financial data, and more standardized communication with the market.
SEBI is also exploring the creation of a regulatory category for debt brokers, professionals who specialize in facilitating bond trades. Alongside this, the regulator is working on a market-making framework in collaboration with the Reserve Bank of India and the finance ministry.
Building on years of incremental reform
SEBI has been chipping away at bond market modernization for years, introducing electronic trading platforms and expanding retail access to bonds through online portals.
A December 2025 report from NITI Aayog, India’s premier policy think tank, recommended that regulators consider piloting tokenised bonds as a way to foster innovation in the country’s financial infrastructure. SEBI’s announcement effectively puts that recommendation into action.