DBS and Citi complete first weekend cross-border USD payment using tokenized deposits on Swift’s blockchain ledger

Moving US dollars between Singapore and the United States on a Saturday used to be about as likely as getting your bank on the phone at 3 a.m. That changed on September 5, 2026, when DBS Bank and Citigroup completed the first successful weekend cross-border USD payment using tokenized deposits on a blockchain-based digital ledger built by Swift. The transaction settled in minutes. The traditional timeline for the same transfer: two business days, assuming nobody took a holiday. How tokenized deposits made it happen Both banks converted traditional deposits into tokenized representations on Swift’s blockchain ledger, allowing value to move between institutions without waiting for the conventional correspondent banking chain to wake up on Monday morning. The tokenized deposits never leave the issuing banks’ balance sheets. Unlike stablecoins or other crypto-native tokens, these tokenized deposits sit within the existing regulatory and risk management framework that banks already operate under. For corporate treasurers, funds that previously sat idle over weekends or overnight, trapped by batch processing schedules and timezone mismatches, can now be deployed in real time. In industri...