S&P Tokenizes iBoxx US Treasury Index on Canton Network

 

S&P Dow Jones Indices and digital asset data firm Kaiko have tokenized a major US Treasury bond index and put it on a blockchain. The iBoxx US Treasuries Index, one of the most closely tracked fixed-income benchmarks in global finance, is now live on the Canton Network as a native digital asset. It is the first time a benchmark of this caliber has been issued directly onchain, and the implications for how institutional markets handle data infrastructure are worth unpacking.

To be clear about what this is and what it is not: the tokenized index is not a tradeable or investable product. Nobody is buying a token and getting exposure to Treasuries. What S&P and Kaiko have created is closer to a permissioned data pipeline, one that wraps licensing rights, compliance controls, and benchmark data into a single non-fungible token. Authorized institutions get access to end-of-day pricing, intraday data, and corporate actions through that token, without going through the traditional off-chain licensing and feed processes that have long been a friction point in finance.

 

Why Treasuries?

The choice of the iBoxx index as the starting point was not random. US Treasuries have become the de facto entry point for institutional tokenization activity, and the numbers back that up. The total tokenized real-world asset market sits at roughly $27 billion, and US government bonds account for the largest share of that, with more than $12.5 billion in Treasuries already issued onchain across various platforms. That is still a fraction of the nearly $28 trillion in outstanding US debt, but the direction of travel is not really in question anymore.

Cameron Drinkwater, Chief Product and Operations Officer at S&P Dow Jones Indices, said the rising use of Treasuries as onchain collateral is creating genuine demand for benchmark data that institutions can access natively on a blockchain. The idea is that as more financial products get built on-chain infrastructure, the underlying reference data needs to live there too. The iBoxx index serves as that reference for countless fixed-income products and strategies. Getting it onchain, in Drinkwater's puts it, is less about novelty and more about meeting clients where the market is heading.

Kaiko CEO Ambre Soubiran has made this point before, the absence of institutional-grade data natively onchain has been one of the persistent infrastructure gaps holding back the broader tokenization market. Asset managers, exchanges, and DeFi protocols that want to reference the iBoxx benchmark previously had to rely on off-chain integrations that were cumbersome and introduced certain data risks. The tokenized version eliminates that middleman step.

 

Why Canton Network?

The decision to launch on Canton Network rather than a more public or crypto-native chain reflects what S&P and Kaiko were aiming for. Canton is an institutional-grade public blockchain with over 600 participating institutions and validators. Goldman Sachs and Citadel are among its backers, which gives it a credibility for the kind of regulated players S&P is trying to reach. The network has also been building its Treasury infrastructure for a while: the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has been running a tokenization service on Canton focused on US Treasuries, with a broader industry rollout expected later in 2026.

But the S&P play is not a solo move at all. Moody's recently integrated its credit ratings with Canton Network, and Bloomberg struck a deal with Kaiko in February to develop on-chain access for its Data License offerings through the same infrastructure, with an initial focus on Treasury and repo workflows. And the pattern is unmistakable, a cluster of major financial data providers is steadily converging on Canton as a shared layer for institutional-grade onchain data. That is a pretty meaningful development for the ecosystem, even if it is not generating the price-action headlines that typically drive crypto coverage.

 

RWA Tokenization Is Becoming The Play

The iBoxx announcement lands during what has genuinely been a breakout stretch for real-world asset tokenization. The total RWA market grew somewhere in the range of 266% through 2025, crossing $24 billion by early 2026. BlackRock's BUIDL fund, Franklin Templeton's onchain government money market product (FOBXX), and a growing roster of institutional players have moved from announcing tokenization pilots to running live products at scale. McKinsey has estimated the market could hit $2 trillion by 2030, a figure that felt wild two years ago and now seems more like a floor than a ceiling.

What is changing most visibly is not just asset issuance but infrastructure. For tokenized markets to function like real markets, they need reliable pricing data, trusted benchmarks, and compliance tooling that works natively in a blockchain environment. The S&P and Kaiko collaboration is an attempt to build exactly that, extending S&P's existing intellectual property protections and licensing frameworks into the onchain world rather than recreating them from scratch. The companies said the approach can be expanded to other indexes if demand warrants it, which is a clear signal that this is a product line in progress rather than just some one-off experiment.

The tokenized Treasury market has arrived at a point where the asset side is pretty well developed. The harder problem now is data and settlement: ensuring that when institutions build onchain products referencing US Treasuries, they can do so with the same data quality and rigor they would expect in traditional markets. S&P and Kaiko are making a direct play that institutions will pay for that, and given the trajectory of the market, that play looks like a very good one.

The iBoxx tokenization does not change what Treasuries are or how they behave. But it does change, how the financial infrastructure around them gets built. And at this stage of the onchain transition, infrastructure moves like this tend to matter more than they first appear to look.