Swiss Custodian Taurus Completes Hedera Integration for Bank Tokenisation

The Swiss digital asset infrastructure provider supervised by FINMA now offers its more than 40 banking and institutional clients the ability to custody assets, issue tokenised products, and deploy smart contracts on Hedera from a single platform. The smart contract capability, the final component in an 18-month integration developed with The Hashgraph Association, went live this week.

Banks using the service can now hold and stake HBAR, Hedera's native currency, create tokens through the Hedera Token Service, and run programmable instruments including tokenised bonds, funds, and stablecoins under the same risk and due-diligence framework they already use for Taurus custody. Clients include Deutsche Bank, CACEIS, and State Street.

The move tackles a recurring operational challenge that has held back institutional adoption: custody providers that excel at safeguarding digital assets often cannot support the programmable instruments banks want to build later. That forces a second vendor search, fresh technology review, and new integration precisely when a digital asset strategy is gaining momentum.

Lamine Brahimi, co-founder and managing partner of Taurus, framed the issue in commercial terms: "Financial institutions need infrastructure that can cover more than one digital asset use case. They want a single platform for the full spectrum of their strategy."

The integration covers all three Taurus platforms — Taurus-PROTECT, Taurus-EXPLORER, and Taurus-CAPITAL. It includes node infrastructure, native token creation, and smart contract deployment via Hedera's EVM-compatible Smart Contract Service, which accepts Solidity and other standard Ethereum developer tools. That compatibility lowers the bar for third-party builders such as tokenisation engines, stablecoin issuers, and fund administrators to run on Hedera under Taurus custody without deploying separate infrastructure.

The announcement comes as institutional tokenisation shifts from pilot programmes to live procurement decisions. Hedera's governing council structure — with nodes operated by Google, IBM, Deutsche Telekom, and Standard Bank — has been a selling point for regulated institutions that need to satisfy internal risk committees on network governance before committing.

The network reports processing more than 70 billion transactions to date. Lloyds Bank recently posted tokenised gilts and fund units as foreign exchange collateral on Hedera, a live capital-markets application that strengthens the network's institutional credentials.

The regulatory landscape is shifting in parallel. In Europe, the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation is now in force. Kamal Youssefi, president of The Hashgraph Association, pointed to both MiCA and the US Clarity Act as frameworks giving institutional investors clearer ground to operate. Full-stack coverage of a well-governed public network, delivered through a regulated custodian, is the kind of configuration compliance teams can approve without treating it as novel risk.

For Taurus, the strategic question is whether single-vendor depth on one network is the right positioning as banks weigh multi-network strategies. Several infrastructure providers are pursuing broad network coverage rather than deep integration on a single chain. Taurus is wagering that operational simplicity and consolidated risk oversight matter more to procurement teams than breadth of network choice, at least near-term. Whether that holds as institutional tokenisation matures will depend on how quickly banks need to operate across multiple distributed ledger networks simultaneously.