Citigroup has launched Digital Depositary Receipts, a blockchain-based product that allows wealthy and institutional investors to gain exposure to shares of private companies. The announcement, made Thursday, marks a significant step in the push by major banks to bring traditional financial assets onto digital asset networks.
The inaugural transaction involved Kaleido, a digital asset and tokenization company backed by Citi Ventures. The platform runs on a permissioned distributed ledger infrastructure provided by SDX, the digital asset arm of Swiss market operator SIX, using R3’s Corda technology. Citi acts as both issuer and custodian, issuing tokenized depositary receipts that represent the underlying private company shares. Investors hold the receipts, not the shares themselves, while Citi safeguards the actual securities.
Initially, the offering is restricted to foreign investors, with distribution handled by Sygnum Bank in Switzerland and SBI Digital Markets in Singapore, targeting institutional and qualified investors across Europe and Asia. U.S. access is planned for a later phase once regulatory conditions permit. The bank says it is already in discussions with some of the world’s largest private companies to participate, aiming to tap into a $75 billion late-stage pre-IPO equity market that has swelled as companies like SpaceX and Anthropic delay public debuts.
Artem Korenyuk, Citi’s global lead for digital assets enterprise alignment and services enablement, described the investor experience as having private-company shares sitting “right next to their Apple stock.” Currently, trades in late-stage private equity can involve manual, weeks-long processing and fragmented cap-table records. Citi claims the new platform can execute such trades near-instantaneously.
The launch is part of a broader tokenization trend. Citi’s own Tokenization 2030 report estimates tokenized real-world assets could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030. The bank has also joined several major U.S. lenders, including JPMorgan and Bank of America, in a plan to develop a shared tokenized deposit network through The Clearing House by mid-2027. Other Wall Street players are moving in the same direction: NYSE has a tokenized securities platform planned for late 2026, and DTCC ran limited production trades in July 2026 with full service from October. Citi says it intends to eventually expand the current infrastructure to support public blockchain networks, potentially broadening access.
