October 17, 2025
By Our Correspondent
A Hong Kong subsidiary of China Merchants Bank (CMB) has tokenised a US$3.5 billion money market fund on BNB Chain, reflecting rising momentum in real-world asset (RWA) adoption among Chinese financial institutions. The move underscores growing experimentation with blockchain infrastructure in regulated finance, even as Beijing has urged caution in this nascent space.
The fund in question is the CMB International USD Money Market Fund, and CMB International Asset Management Limited collaborated with BNB Chain to issue two blockchain tokens: CMBMINT and CMBIMINT. These tokens will be made available exclusively to accredited investors via crypto platforms DigiFT and OnChain.
The CMBMINT and CMBIMINT tokens represent units in the underlying USD-denominated money market fund. They support both fiat and stablecoin subscriptions, enabling a blend of traditional and crypto-native funding windows for investors. The deployment onto BNB Chain is intended to bring quicker settlement, broader access, and enhanced efficiency to regulated investment products.
BNB Chain has long positioned itself as a core layer for asset tokenisation. Sarah Song, Head of Business Development at BNB Chain, said the partnership not only helps the Chinese financial sector reach “a broader global investor base” but also reinforces BNB Chain’s ambition to act as “the tokenisation layer for all assets.”
Institutions are increasingly exploring tokenisation in Hong Kong, which has been nurturing itself as a digital asset hub since 2022. Hong Kong’s regulatory regime and capital markets infrastructure make it a natural staging ground for Chinese banks and asset managers to test blockchain applications.
Still, regulators in Beijing have issued warnings about potential risks around tokenised assets, including compliance, systemic risk, and consumer protection. Despite these cautions, the RWA movement continues to draw interest, particularly in offshore jurisdictions like Hong Kong where regulatory clarity is stronger.
By launching this large-scale tokenisation, CMB Hong Kong joins a growing number of financial firms moving to bridge traditional finance with blockchain rails. The hope is that regulated institutions can leverage DLT’s advantages faster settlement, transparency, lower friction to expand investment access, especially for cross-border and institutional capital flows.
While it remains early days, the CMB–BNB Chain collaboration signals a growing confidence among institutional players to experiment with tokenised financial products in regulated channels. If successful, such projects could accelerate the mainstreaming of digital asset infrastructure in Asia’s capital markets.
