The UK government appointed Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Morgan Stanley, NatWest and RBC Capital Markets as joint lead managers for the pilot issuance of DIGIT, the Digital Gilt Instrument, completing a competitive procurement process and clearing the way for investor engagement to begin. Economic Secretary to the Treasury Lucy Rigby KC MP announced the appointments Tuesday in her keynote speech at UK Digital Assets Week, calling issuance early next year a core part of the government’s ambition to be a global hub for digital assets.
The pilot is designed to test distributed-ledger technology across a bond’s full lifecycle. DIGIT will be digitally native and short-dated, issued on a platform operating inside the Digital Securities Sandbox with on-chain settlement, and it will sit independent of the government’s main debt management programme. The lead managers will provide traditional underwriting and distribution services alongside investor engagement, combining conventional sovereign issuance expertise with digital-markets capability.
Tuesday’s step follows two earlier milestones: HSBC was appointed as the distributed-ledger technology supplier in February, and in July HSBC and the London Stock Exchange Group signed a memorandum of understanding to deliver a bilateral digital securities depository link. The government says the pilot aims both to let it explore how DLT applies to sovereign debt issuance and to catalyze UK-based DLT infrastructure as other financial hubs pursue similar experiments.