Wall Street’s Next Onchain Test Gives Citi Clients Tokenized Access to Private Shares

The system builds on Citi’s partnership with SIX Digital Exchange, or SDX, announced in May 2025. Citi said the project would tokenize, settle and safekeep late-stage pre-IPO equities on SDX’s blockchain-based Central Securities Depositary platform.

For investors, the pitch is simple: private shares that have long moved through paper-heavy, relationship-driven markets can be wrapped in a digital security and handled inside a regulated custody and settlement framework.

Citi’s structure uses tokenized depositary receipts tied to underlying private-company shares. The bank issues the securities and acts as custodian, according to the Journal, allowing clients to hold the exposure alongside traditional assets.

Artem Korenyuk, Citi’s global lead for digital assets enterprise alignment and services enablement, told the Journal the model lets clients place private-company shares “right next to their Apple stock.”

The fine print matters. The Kaleido DDRs were not registered under the U.S. Securities Act and can be offered or transferred only through offshore Regulation S transactions to non-U.S. persons, according to the SIX document.

Citi’s own Tokenization 2030 report estimates the global tokenized asset market at about $17 billion today and projects a $5.5 trillion base case by 2030, with a bull case of $8.2 trillion.

Citi expects early growth to be led by public-market securities, especially U.S. equities and Treasuries, while private markets remain slower and more structurally constrained. That makes the Citi-SDX rollout more of a serious infrastructure step than a mass-market opening.