Real-World Blockchain Use Cases from Around the Globe

Digital assets are no longer confined to white papers. Across leading markets, established institutions are using blockchain to issue securities, move money, and settle trades within existing frameworks. This blog highlights four live examples from Singapore, the United States, Switzerland, and a Canadian fintech operating globally that show how blockchain infrastructure is being used to modernize banking, payments, and capital markets.

Singapore: DBS brings tokenization into everyday banking

Issuing tokenized notes on public rails. DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, disclosed that its clients executed over $US1 billion of trades in crypto-linked structured notes and options in H1 2025, with volumes up ~60% from Q1 to Q2. In August 2025, the bank said it will issue and distribute tokenized, cash-settled structured notes on the public Ethereum network. The notes will be available to eligible investors via regulated platforms ADDX, DigitFT, and HydraX.

Programmable rewards at retail scale. In July 2025, DBS Token Services launched Programmable Rewards, blockchain-enabled e-vouchers in the PayLah! App, powered by smart contracts on DBS’s permissioned blockchain. Issuers can reach 2.9 million wallet users and more than 40,000 acceptance points via the national NETS QR network. Smart-contract rules verify where and when a voucher can be redeemed, while merchant payouts continue to flow over existing payment rails. By recording redemption rules and usage on a shared ledger, the program helps streamline voucher reconciliation, making large-scale rewards schemes easier for banks and merchants to manage.

Institutional market infrastructure. DBS Digital Exchange (DDEx), the bank-operated digital asset exchange for institutional and accredited clients, reported a 171% increase in trading volumes in the first half of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024 (DBS did not disclose absolute figures).

Taken together, these initiatives shorten issuance and distribution cycles, improve settlement visibility through shared, time-stamped records, and reduce manual reconciliation by automating payouts and entitlements under predefined rules.

United States: BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund

BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) shows how a familiar product can run on blockchain while keeping standard investor protections. Investors subscribe and redeem through Securitize, a regulated intermediary that performs KYC/AML and maintains the official shareholder register. The fund shares are issued as tokens on public blockchains and transfer only between approved wallets. The portfolio assets remain invested in traditional money-market instruments with custodians. This preserves the compliance and record-keeping of a regulated fund while allowing the shares to settle and move on-chain.

BUIDL crossed US$1 billion in assets under management on March 13, 2025 and is now available across seven public blockchains. In June 2025, Crypto.com and Deribit announced they would accept BUIDL tokens as collateral for eligible clients, meaning those tokens can be pledged directly on the platforms to back trades. By September 24, 2025, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, using RWA.xyz data, placed BUIDL at about US$2.5 billion and described it as the largest tokenized private fund. 

Switzerland: A Pilot Using Wholesale Central-bank-money to settle tokenized bonds

Since late 2023, the Swiss National Bank’s Project Helvetia III has run a live pilot on SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) that lets participating banks settle tokenized bond trades in a test version of Swiss-franc wholesale central bank digital currency. By mid-2024, the pilot had settled six digital bond issuances totaling about CHF 750 million, including a CHF 200 million World Bank issue in May that helped push cumulative digital-asset issuance on SDX above CHF 1 billion ($1.75 billion CAD)

Helvetia explores two ways to bring central bank money to tokenized markets. The first is what’s already live on SDX: issuing a digital form of central bank money for banks to use when settling tokenized assets. The second connects tokenized-asset platforms to Switzerland’s real-time interbank payment system (SIC) so cash can move in existing central bank accounts while the securities remain on a tokenized ledger. Helvetia III focused first on the SDX model, and in June 2025, the SNB said it would expand to the SIC approach. The goal in both cases is to have the bond and the payment move at the same time in central-bank money, under official oversight. This speeds up settlement, reduces risk, and shows it can be done without creating a retail CBDC. 

Aquanow: Infrastructure behind bank-grade crypto trading and payments

Merchant payments in the UAE. In February 2025, Canadian Web3 Council member Aquanow partnered with Hubpay to launch the UAE’s first fully regulated crypto payment gateway for businesses. 

Crypto in a Major Bank App. In March 2025, Emirates NBD – Dubai’s largest bank – launched cryptocurrency trading in its Liv X app, powered by Aquanow’s institutional-grade trading infrastructure. Aquanow’s fully disclosed brokerage integration allows customers to buy, sell, and hold digital assets seamlessly within the bank’s interface, combining the agility of fintech innovation with the trust of traditional banking. Zodia Custody complements the model by providing secure asset safekeeping in line with global best practices.

24/7 conversion for institutions. In August 2025, Aquanow and SGB (a licensed digital bank regulated by the Central Bank of Bahrain) announced a partnership to offer institutional clients around-the-clock crypto-to-fiat conversions across supported currencies, using SGB’s real-time settlement platform (SGB Net) and banking network.

Aquanow illustrates how a specialist infrastructure and liquidity provider can help regulated institutions and merchants plug blockchain into existing payment rails without overhauling core systems. The company reports serving 300+ clients in 50+ countries and more than US$100 billion in cumulative platform volume; it also holds a full VARA VASP license in Dubai and has been recognized in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 (Canada). 

Conclusion

Southeast Asia’s largest bank is distributing tokenized notes and offering programmable payments to millions of retail users. The world’s largest asset manager is operating a multi-billion-dollar tokenized money-market fund. In Switzerland, participating banks are settling tokenized bonds in central-bank money using blockchain rails and existing payment rails. And a Canadian digital-asset infrastructure company is powering crypto services and cross-border crypto payments for its bank clients.

Together, these cases show that blockchain is not a theoretical upgrade but a working layer of today’s financial system, improving issuance speed, settlement certainty, and access to liquidity. The modernization of financial services is no longer hypothetical; it is underway.