CMTA Recognizes Cardano Contract for Swiss Tokenized-Share Certification

The Capital Markets and Technology Association (CMTA) has recognized a reviewed Cardano smart-contract implementation for use in its Swiss tokenized-share certification process, allowing it to replace CMTA’s reference contract when deployment conditions are met.

The Expert Committee’s Oct. 6 decision applies to a specific contract implementing CIP-0113. It does not extend recognition to every contract using the standard. Each deployment must put the tokenization terms, or a hash of those terms, on-chain; use zero decimal places; include the token name and ticker in its metadata; and record the Cardano Base Layer commit against which the contract’s reliance on the layer was checked.

The recognition is limited to tokenized shares. It does not cover CMTA’s tokenized-debt certification program or Cardano’s base-layer infrastructure, and it does not replace regulatory approvals or an issuer’s legal obligations. CMTA’s process separately reviews each share issuance through legal and technical checks and verifies that shareholders received the tokens.

CIP-0113 went live on Cardano mainnet Oct. 7. The standard lets issuers attach compliance rules to native tokens, which the ledger checks during transfers, minting and burning. “the issuer’s rules are checked by the ledger on every transaction,” said Giovanni Gargiulo, senior blockchain architect at the Cardano Foundation. The mainnet launch of CIP-0113 was covered separately.

By Oct. 8, Veridian shares had been tokenized as ledger-based securities under Switzerland’s DLT Act using CIP-0113. That tokenization does not establish that the share issuance received CMTA certification.

CMTA Token (CMTAT), the group’s reference framework, is an open, blockchain-agnostic smart-contract framework for tokenizing financial instruments. The framework can support equity and debt securities, while the Oct. 6 recognition applies only to the reviewed Cardano contract’s eligibility for the share-certification process.