According to an announcement, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's EnsembleTX has completed its first cross-bank transaction combining tokenized gold and tokenized deposits.
The transaction was conducted with Zhaojin Mining as the gold issuer, China Construction Bank (Asia) serving as the gold custodian and payment bank, and Bank of East Asia together with Joint Electronic Teller Services Limited acting as the receiving bank.
Technical support was provided by Ant Digital Technologies' independently developed tokenization platform Anvita TaaS.
Using the Hong Kong Gold Benchmark Price (HAU) as a reference, the transaction completed the tokenized issuance and ownership transfer of London Good Delivery (LGD) standard gold bars.
The core innovation of this transaction lies in introducing on-chain digital certificates (gToken) for physical gold without altering the existing bank gold account system and property rights transfer pathways, synchronizing the record of gold ownership transfer onto the blockchain.
All parties to the transaction can verify key information and holding status of the gold based on the same on-chain record, achieving traceability and auditability of physical gold transactions.
This provides a trustworthy data foundation for the digital circulation of physical gold.
Meanwhile, fund settlement in the transaction was routed through tokenized deposits (TD) via the Ensemble project's interoperability layer to the Hong Kong dollar Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system.
This achieved instant cross-bank fund settlement, offering a more efficient, transparent, and traceable settlement model for large-value gold transactions between institutions.
The Anvita TaaS tokenization platform provided by Ant Digital Technologies for this transaction operates on its self-developed Layer 2 blockchain platform Jovay.
Beyond core capabilities such as institutional-grade whitelisting mechanisms, on-chain and off-chain data synchronization, and a secure and compliant architecture, the platform was designed from the outset with compatibility with the Hong Kong Precious Metals Central Clearing System (HKPMCC) in mind.
This ensures that tokenized gold assets can seamlessly connect to Hong Kong's central clearing infrastructure when needed.
Additionally, the platform adopts a modular design that can be extended in the future to support advanced use cases such as multiple custodians, multiple asset classes, and multiple clearing networks.
This reserves technical space for the scaled development of Hong Kong's tokenization market.
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