AMINA Bank, the Swiss FINMA-licensed crypto bank, has joined 21X's DLT trading and settlement system as a listing sponsor, the first regulated bank to do so. Combined with AMINA's existing partnership with Tokeny for onchain issuance, the integration creates a complete pipeline from traditional asset custody through tokenization to regulated secondary market trading.
The operational implications matter more than the headline. For regulated digital asset firms running separate relationships with banking partners, custodians, issuance platforms, and trading venues, this represents a reference architecture where those functions collapse into coordinated infrastructure rather than independently contracted services.
21X opened the first ever fully regulated distributed ledger technology trading and settlement system (DLT TSS) in the EU on 8th September 2025, enabling atomic trading without counterparty or credit risk through smart contract-based issuance, trading and settlement of tokenized stocks, bonds and funds. Order matching and settlement take place within two seconds compared to traditional settlement times of days or even weeks.
That two-second settlement window isn't just a technical improvement, it's a structural elimination of the reconciliation workflows, margin requirements, and counterparty risk management that consume operations bandwidth when settlement cycles stretch across days. With the increasing need for rapid settlement systems in today's fast-paced markets, blockchain can offer flexibility and automation to the settlement without relying on other third parties, such as CSD or central banks.
The license to 21X was issued under the EU's DLT Pilot Regime (DLTR), a regulatory framework designed to enable the testing and operation of distributed ledger technology-based trading and settlement systems. 21X became the first ever entity to receive a license to operate a blockchain-based trading and settlement system fully regulated in accordance with European Union law, granted by BaFin, Germany's financial supervisory authority. This followed one and a half years of intensive scrutiny by BaFin, the Bundesbank and European supervisory authorities including ESMA and the ECB.
The regulatory path matters for operations teams evaluating infrastructure choices. The Pilot Regime Regulation came into application on 23 March 2023 and will run for a period of 3 years, renewable or extendable to 6 years total. In a letter to ESMA dated May 2024, the European Commission publicly stated that the regime would not have an expiry date. This isn't a sandbox experiment with an uncertain future, it's production infrastructure operating under permanent regulatory authorization.
The AMINA integration adds banking-grade custody and listing sponsorship to 21X's trading and settlement capabilities. AMINA Bank AG was founded in April 2018 and established in Zug, Switzerland. In August 2019, AMINA Bank AG received the Swiss Banking and Securities Dealer License from FINMA. Since receiving its FINMA licence in 2019, AMINA has expanded across four jurisdictions, including Switzerland, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, and the EU via Austria, and maintained a zero-default lending track record over more than six years.
The third component is Tokeny, which handles onchain issuance through the ERC-3643 standard. Apex Group, the global financial services provider, announced the acquisition of a majority stake in Tokeny in May 2025, with the transaction seeing Apex Group have 100% control over the next three years, following the initial investment and strategic partnership announced in December 2023. Tokeny's solutions have been used to tokenize over $32bn in assets, having created ERC-3643, the technical market standard for compliant tokenisation.
ERC-3643 is an Ethereum token standard for permissioned tokens, meaning tokens that can only be held and transferred by identities that satisfy predefined compliance rules such as KYC/AML, investor eligibility, and jurisdiction requirements. For operations teams, this means compliance logic is encoded at the token level rather than enforced through separate reporting and monitoring systems.
The combined infrastructure addresses a specific pain point that operations leaders will recognize: the absence of an end-to-end pathway connecting regulated traditional asset custody with onchain issuance and liquid secondary markets. Each vendor relationship in a fragmented stack adds onboarding time, contract negotiation, integration work, and ongoing coordination overhead. When settlement failures occur, they propagate across multiple systems with different support structures and different incentives.
This isn't theoretical. The Real-World Assets tokenization market stands at $24 billion in 2025, having grown 308% over three years. Private credit alone made up over 58% of tokenized real-world asset flows in the first half of 2025, while tokenized US Treasuries accounted for 34%, pointing to strong institutional adoption. The infrastructure buildout is happening regardless of whether individual firms participate.
21X has secured over 30 exchange participant agreements during recent months, with more than 100 financial instruments from globally leading issuers in the pipeline. The platform isn't waiting for consensus on whether tokenized securities infrastructure is viable, it's accumulating participants and instruments while competitors debate architecture.
The operational question isn't whether DLT-native infrastructure works. The question is what your current architecture costs you in time, complexity, and execution quality relative to integrated alternatives. If your onboarding timelines run 6-12 months because you're coordinating five vendor relationships, and a regulated bank can plug into a DLT TSS as a single counterparty, the difference isn't just efficiency, it's competitive positioning.
For operations teams managing fragmented vendor stacks, the AMINA/21X integration raises a structural question: how much of the complexity you manage daily is inherent to regulated digital asset operations, and how much is an artifact of infrastructure choices made when integrated alternatives didn't exist. The alternatives now exist. Whether they're right for your firm depends on your specific requirements, but the option to evaluate them is no longer speculative.
The firms moving first won't be the ones with the most sophisticated multi-vendor management processes. They'll be the ones who recognize that sophisticated multi-vendor management is the problem, not the solution.
References
[1] 21X official announcement on BaFin DLT TSS license
[2] 21X secondary market launch announcement
[3] EU Regulation 2022/858 on DLT Pilot Regime
