Citi Launches Crypto Platform to Tokenize Private Company Shares

Citigroup, the $2.7 trillion U.S. banking group, is launching a crypto platform to issue tokenized depositary receipts representing shares in private companies. The bank said it is already in talks with some of the world's largest private companies ahead of the rollout.

Why it matters

Citi is the first major U.S. universal bank to attach its balance sheet and client roster directly to the tokenization of private-equity holdings. The initial phase targets foreign investors — a segment historically locked out of U.S. private markets by accreditation and minimum-check friction — using on-chain depositary receipts as the distribution rail.

Market impact

The move formalizes a thesis the real-world-asset sector has been pricing for two years: that the next billion dollars of tokenization flow will follow bank-led issuance, not retail DeFi rails. Tokenized private credit and equity have been the fastest-growing RWA subcategory by TVL, and a Citi-branded wrapper reframes the asset class for institutional allocators who have been waiting for a Tier-1 counterparty to enter.

Watch for: which private companies sign first, whether the receipts clear through DTC or a parallel settlement stack, and how fast the bank opens the platform to public-company equity.