DBS Bank is increasing the liquidity and accessibility of structured notes through tokenization, transforming instruments with a minimum entry threshold of $100,000 into fractional tokens valued at $1,000.
DBS, Singapore’s largest bank, announced the launch of a program to tokenize structured notes on the Ethereum blockchain. These products will be available to accredited and institutional investors through platforms ADDX, DigiFT, and HydraX, thereby opening access to this asset class to users who aren’t direct clients of the bank.
A structured note is a complex, fixed-term debt instrument issued by a financial institution, with returns linked to a predefined performance scenario of one or more underlying assets.
The first tokenized product from DBS will be cash-settled cryptocurrency-linked participation notes. The structure allows investors to gain returns from rising crypto prices without directly holding the underlying assets, while also incorporating mechanisms to mitigate potential losses in the event of price declines.
The tokenization process breaks a structured note into separate tokens, each representing a $1,000 share of the original asset, making them fungible and significantly simplifying trading. Investors will be able to submit official purchase requests directly to DBS during the initial issuance at a set price, as well as trade the tokens with high flexibility and precision, enabling more effective portfolio management amid market volatility.
The press release notes that demand for such instruments is steadily growing. In H1 2025, DBS clients traded more than $1 billion worth of cryptocurrency options and structured notes, with Q2 trading volume increasing by nearly 60% compared to Q1. In the future, DBS plans to tokenize other types of structured notes, including equity-linked and credit-linked notes.
According to Li Zhen, Head of Foreign Exchange and Digital Assets at DBS, asset tokenization represents the next frontier in the development of financial market infrastructure.
The initiative also responds to growing demand from professional investors in Singapore, where the number of family offices rose by 43% in 2024, surpassing 2,000.
Family offices across Asia are increasing their allocations to digital assets, Reuters reports, with a surge in crypto demand observed in Singapore, Hong Kong, and mainland China.
According to a comprehensive analysis of blockchain industry development by jurisdiction, Singapore ranked among the global leaders in Web3 technologies in 2024.
