Lloyds Banking Group, Aberdeen Investments, and Archax completed the United Kingdom’s first foreign exchange trades using tokenized real-world assets as collateral on the Hedera network. The pilot, conducted under a regulated digital asset framework, utilized tokenized Aberdeen money market fund units and tokenized UK gilts to support FX trades between the institutions. The HM Treasury-backed Wholesale Digital Markets Champion report subsequently cited the initiative as a notable industry achievement in advancing digital wholesale markets.
The UK handles roughly $5.4 trillion in daily FX and interest rate derivatives activity, lending the test significant weight for institutional finance. The project targeted long-standing inefficiencies in collateral and margining processes—often slow, expensive, and fragile under market stress—by enabling programmable, near-real-time movement of tokenized collateral. Archax, the UK’s first FCA-regulated digital asset exchange and tokenization platform, issued, transferred, and custodied the assets on Hedera, using its Nest permissioned DeFi collateral transfer network to ensure a controlled environment accessible only to approved participants.
Aberdeen’s Head of Product, Allan Trimmer, emphasized that Hedera aligned with the firm’s values of transparency, corporate governance, and sustainability, noting that the network is among the lowest energy consumers. The Hedera network’s governing council of global organisations and its fast settlement capabilities were central to the pilot’s success.
