Bringing programmable money to Spain’s banking system
Five Spanish financial institutions – ABANCA, Cecabank, Ibercaja, Kutxabank, and Unicaja – completed the first multi-bank proof of concept for tokenized deposits in Spain. Orchestrated and managed by Cecabank, with strategic support from Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the initiative used Asseto, the tokenization platform developed by ioBuilders and powered by the private HashSphere network, to move deposits between banks over distributed ledger technology (DLT). Colonya Caixa Pollença and Caixa Ontinyent joined as observer entities, following the design and results throughout.
The result is a working demonstration that regulated commercial bank money can be tokenized, transferred instantly between institutions, and settled with finality – all without issuing any cryptocurrency and without changing the legal or accounting nature of the underlying deposit.
The Challenge: Modernizing settlement without leaving the balance sheet
Interbank payments in Spain, as elsewhere, still rely on settlement processes that are batch-based, sequential, and time-bound. Value moves through intermediaries and clearing windows, reconciliation is manual, and funds are frequently unavailable outside business hours. As financial activity moves toward always-on digital markets, this friction becomes a growing constraint.
Tokenization offers a way forward, but it raises a hard question for regulated banks: How do you capture the speed and programmability of digital money without giving up the protections that make a bank deposit a bank deposit? Many digital-money models sit outside the deposit framework, which means they fall outside the prudential rules, the credit intermediation function, and the depositor protections that customers and supervisors rely on.
A credible solution had to satisfy several requirements at once: Instant, round-the-clock interbank settlement; a shared, verifiable record across multiple competing institutions; strict alignment with the existing regulatory framework; and a controlled environment in which sensitive banking operations could run safely.
The Solution: A shared private ledger anchored to real bank accounts
The proof of concept centered on tokenized deposits – a digital representation of a traditional bank deposit that preserves its full legal, regulatory, and accounting character – while unlocking the capabilities of programmable money: instant settlement, continuous availability, and automated flow orchestration through smart contracts. Crucially, the tokenized deposit remains on the balance sheet of the issuing bank under the same prudential framework as a conventional deposit, keeping Deposit Guarantee Fund coverage, the credit intermediation function, and the direct contractual relationship between the bank and its customer intact.
The banks also needed to execute interbank transfers of tokenized deposits in a closed, controlled environment. To guarantee that value moved with certainty, Cecabank created a dedicated account structure that settled each movement instantly and kept them in sync with the operations generated on the DLT network. In effect, the ledger and the banks’ books moved together: A transfer recorded on the network was matched by an equivalent, final settlement across the account structure, eliminating the delays inherent in traditional interbank processes.
The trial was on Asseto, ioBuilders’ end-to-end modular platform for issuing, managing, and settling tokenized instruments, powered by HashSphere – Hashgraph’s private, permissioned enterprise network built using Hedera technology. This gave all participants a shared environment in which multiple banks could issue and exchange tokenized deposits against a common, trusted source of truth.
Learn more about Asseto, powered by HashSphere
How the model worked in practice
In the trial, each participating bank issued tokenized deposits representing balances on its own books and transferred them to another institution over a shared network. Because settlement was synchronized with Cecabank’s account structure, the receiving bank saw value arrived with immediate finality rather than waiting on a clearing cycle.
The design demonstrated three things that matter to an enterprise-grade production system.
- Interbank transfers can be completed instantly and continuously, rather than within fixed settlement windows.
- Multiple banks – including direct competitors – can operate on the same infrastructure while each retains control of its own issuance and its own customer relationships.
- None of this requires stepping outside the deposit framework: To the customer and the supervisor, the instrument remains ordinary bank money.
By tokenizing the deposit rather than replacing it, the participants preserved the safety of central-bank-anchored commercial banking while unlocking the efficiency of a programmable, shared ledger.
“This milestone reflects what Spanish banks can achieve when they build on shared, neutral infrastructure. Asseto powered by HashSphere gave five institutions a single trusted environment to issue and exchange tokenized deposits, with the instant settlement and governance that regulated finance demands. It is a genuine advance for digital money in Spain.”
Matt Ward
Executive Director, Europe
A bank-orchestrated, neutral foundation
One of the defining features of this initiative is who sat at the center of it. Rather than being run on a commercially controlled platform belonging to a single competitor, the proof of concept was orchestrated by Cecabank – Spain’s leading wholesale and securities-services bank whose role was to serve other financial institutions rather than compete with them for retail customers.
That neutrality is what makes multi-bank participation credible: institutions can share and settle on common infrastructure without ceding advantage to a rival.
This collaborative posture extended beyond the trial itself. The initiative builds on earlier innovation work carried out in coordination with the Bank of Spain, notably the 2024 proof of concept for the issuance of a tokenized bond, consolidating a trajectory of shared experimentation with DLT-based financial infrastructure. It also aligns with the broader European direction of travel: Eurosystem projects such as Pontes and Appia are shaping the architecture of Europe’s tokenized financial system, in which tokenized money is expected to play a fundamental role as a payment and settlement mechanism in digital markets.
Why HashSphere
HashSphere was selected because the use case demanded institutional-grade compliance and control alongside a path to the wider digital-money ecosystem. Sensitive interbank operations must run in a permissioned environment with strong governance and data privacy, yet the long-term value of tokenized deposits depends on their ability to interoperate with public networks and emerging market infrastructure.
HashSphere’s private network architecture satisfied these requirements simultaneously:
- Private, permissioned execution for regulated interbank workflows
- Enterprise-grade performance and reliability
- Trusted, transparent governance
- Low, predictable transaction costs in USD
- A native path to interoperability with the public Hedera network
Because Asseto is powered by both the private HashSphere network and the public Hedera network, the banks were not locked into a single deployment model. They could extend from a controlled proof of concept toward broader connectivity as use cases mature. The Hashgraph team supports both the Hedera network codebase and HashSphere, thus ensuring the private and public DLT environments evolve together, reducing long-term infrastructure risk for the participants.
Impact
The proof of concept validated the technical and operational viability of multi-bank tokenized deposits in Spain and generated a shared knowledge base for the participants to build on. By demonstrating instant interbank settlement within the existing deposit framework, it showed how Spanish banks can improve on traditional liquidation processes, reducing settlement delays, enabling around-the-clock availability, and opening the door to automated, programmable payment flows – all without compromising depositor protection or prudential treatment.
As the first fully Spanish initiative focused on tokenized deposits and one of the early movers in Europe, this landmark trial also positioned the participating institutions ahead of the regulatory and market infrastructure now taking shape across the Eurosystem.
Summary
This Cecabank-orchestrated trial demonstrates how private and public DLT can be combined to modernize the core of the banking system – interbank settlement – while keeping money firmly inside the regulated deposit framework. Using Asseto powered by HashSphere, five Spanish banks issued and exchanged tokenized deposits with instant settlement in a shared, controlled environment, backed by an account structure that kept the ledger and the banks’ books in lockstep.
Backed by the neutrality of a wholesale bank, the strategic guidance of BCG, and infrastructure built for institutional requirements, this is tokenization applied not as a speculative asset, but as a faster, programmable foundation for trusted bank money.
