Tokenized government bonds could be a bigger deal than most people realize. That’s the message from Hyun Song Shin, governor of the Bank of Korea.
Speaking at the ECB Forum on Central Banking in Sintra, Portugal, Shin said tokenizing government bonds makes issuance and management dramatically simpler. Verifying collateral, crediting accounts, reversing transactions — all of it gets easier when it’s on a ledger.
“The big prize is tokenizing government bonds,” Shin said. “It’s much easier, much less prone to mistakes.”
He’s not wrong. US Treasury debt is already the largest tokenized real-world asset category — $14.6 billion, about 46% of the $31.7 billion RWA market. That’s real money.
Shin also laid out a bigger vision: a unified ledger combining tokenized government bonds, wholesale CBDCs, and tokenized commercial bank deposits. It’s an extension of Project Hangang, the Bank of Korea’s blockchain-based wholesale CBDC pilot.
The Bank for International Settlements backs this up. A July 2025 BIS report found “suggestive evidence” that tokenized bonds have lower bid-ask spreads than traditional ones, with comparable issuance costs and yields. The BIS examined 39 tokenized bonds — 15 government and 24 corporate.
Of course, regulatory and infrastructure challenges remain. But the direction is clear. Central banks are looking at this seriously.
