Itaú enters ANBIMA tokenization pilot with OpenAssets — a vendor part-backed by the bank's founding family

Itaú Unibanco, Latin America's largest lender, has started work with digital-asset infrastructure provider OpenAssets on a tokenization pilot organized by ANBIMA, Brazil's financial and capital markets association, the two companies said Tuesday in a joint press release reported by CoinDesk.

The pilot is meant to test how fixed-income securities and investment funds can be issued, traded and settled on distributed-ledger systems, and to work through the rules and technical standards banks and asset managers would need to run them. Neither company disclosed the size of the test, which instruments are involved, when it starts or when it ends.

Itaú held more than $562 billion in total assets, according to S&P Global data cited by CoinDesk. It is not the bank's first pass at this: Itaú was among the institutions Brazil's central bank selected in 2023 for the Drex pilot, which tested blockchain-based transactions in tokenized money and assets.

OpenAssets raised $10 million last year in a round led by Valor Capital Group, with participation from Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, and from members of the family that founded Itaú Unibanco, per CoinDesk.

Key facts

• Itaú Unibanco and OpenAssets announced the ANBIMA pilot on Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026, via press release (CoinDesk, citing the companies).
• Scope: issuance, trading and settlement of tokenized fixed income and investment funds, plus rules and technical standards (the companies' statement).
• Itaú total assets: more than $562 billion (S&P Global, cited by CoinDesk).
• Itaú participated in the central bank's Drex pilot beginning 2023 (CoinDesk).
• OpenAssets raised $10 million last year; investors included Valor Capital Group (lead), Tether, and members of Itaú's founding family (CoinDesk).
• Brazilian precedents CoinDesk lists as announced plans, not completed programs: VERT Capital's stated intent to tokenize up to $1 billion of debt and receivables on XDC Network (July 2025); Mercado Bitcoin's $200 million plan on the XRP Ledger; and 10 dairy cows tokenized by farmers in Paraná through infrastructure connected to the B3 exchange.

The real-world read

The announcement is a vendor-and-client press release, not a disclosure or a regulatory filing, and it carries no numbers: no notional value, no instrument list, no dates. That is the tell for a pilot at the exploration stage — which sits awkwardly next to OpenAssets CEO Gabor Gurbacs's framing that Brazil is "a natural place to move tokenization from exploration to production." Three years after Drex, Itaú is still piloting.

The relationship worth naming: members of the family that founded Itaú are investors in the counterparty OpenAssets. That is not the bank itself, and nothing suggests impropriety — but neither company said whether the overlap was disclosed to ANBIMA or bore on the selection. Tether's stake in the same vendor is a second interested party with a direct commercial stake in tokenized rails reaching Brazil's largest bank.

Also discount the market-size framing: Citi's estimate that tokenized securities could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030 is a forecast by a bank that sells tokenization services, not a measurement.

Opinion, and whose

• Gabor Gurbacs, chairman and CEO of OpenAssets: Brazil is "one of the most forward-looking markets in finance" and a natural place to move tokenization from exploration to production. He is the vendor.
• Citi: tokenized securities could grow into a $5.5 trillion market by 2030. A projection, and Citi is a participant in the sector.
• Itaú and ANBIMA offered no forecast of their own in the announcement.

Sources

• CoinDesk (Aug. 11, 2026) — the sole account of the announcement; itself based on a joint press release from Itaú and OpenAssets, i.e. the parties' own marketing. CoinDesk also supplied the Drex, VERT Capital, Mercado Bitcoin and Paraná details, and attributed the asset figure to S&P Global and the market forecast to Citi.
• Itaú / OpenAssets press release — via CoinDesk. Marketing material; treat its framing accordingly.
• S&P Global — Itaú's total assets, as cited by CoinDesk.
• Citi — the 2030 tokenization forecast, as cited by CoinDesk.

ANBIMA has not published its own account of the pilot's terms, and neither company answered the basic questions of scale or schedule.

Nothing here is investment advice.