Taurus, the Swiss digital asset infrastructure provider supervised by FINMA, has completed its integration of the full Hedera technology stack, enabling the more than 40 banks and regulated financial institutions it serves to custody assets, issue tokenised products and deploy smart contracts from a single platform. The final phase, smart contract capability, is now live after an 18-month build carried out in strategic partnership with The Hashgraph Association.

The practical effect is that an institution can now custody and stake HBAR, Hedera’s native currency, issue tokens via the Hedera Token Service, and run programmable instruments such as tokenised bonds, funds and stablecoins, all under the same due-diligence and risk framework it already applies to Taurus for custody. Clients of Taurus include Deutsche Bank, CACEIS and State Street.

The operational problem being solved

The announcement addresses a structural friction point that has slowed institutional digital asset adoption: the mismatch between custody infrastructure and tokenisation ambition. A bank that selects a custody provider for straightforward digital asset holding often finds that provider cannot support the programmable instruments it wants to issue later, requiring a separate vendor search, a fresh technology assessment and a new integration project at precisely the moment a digital asset strategy is gaining traction.

Lamine Brahimi, co-founder and managing partner of Taurus, described the commercial logic directly: “Financial institutions need infrastructure that can cover more than one digital asset use case. They want a single platform for the full spectrum of their strategy.”

The integration spans all three Taurus platforms: Taurus-PROTECT, Taurus-EXPLORER and Taurus-CAPITAL. It includes node infrastructure, native token issuance and smart contract deployment through Hedera’s EVM-compatible Smart Contract Service, which accepts Solidity and other standard Ethereum developer tooling. That compatibility matters because it lowers the barrier for third-party product builders, including tokenisation engines, stablecoin issuers and fund administrators, who can now run on Hedera under Taurus custody without deploying additional infrastructure of their own.

Regulatory and market context

The announcement arrives as institutional tokenisation moves from pilot programmes to live procurement decisions. Hedera’s governing council structure, with nodes operated by organisations including Google, IBM, Deutsche Telekom and Standard Bank, has been one of the network’s selling points for regulated institutions that need to satisfy internal risk committees on network governance before committing. The network reports more than 70 billion transactions processed to date, and Lloyds Bank recently used it to post tokenised gilts and fund units as foreign exchange collateral, a live capital-markets use case that strengthens the network’s institutional credentials.

The regulatory frame is shifting in parallel. In Europe, the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation is now in effect, and Kamal Youssefi, president of The Hashgraph Association, cited both MiCA and the US Clarity Act as frameworks that give institutional investors clearer ground to operate on. Full-stack coverage of a well-governed public network, offered through a regulated custodian, is precisely the kind of configuration compliance teams can approve without treating it as a novel risk.

For Taurus, the competitive question is whether single-vendor depth on one network is the right positioning as banks evaluate multi-network strategies. Several infrastructure providers are pursuing broad network coverage rather than deep integration on a single chain. Taurus is betting that operational simplicity and consolidated risk oversight matter more to procurement teams than breadth of network choice, at least in the near term. Whether that holds as institutional tokenisation matures will depend on how quickly banks need to operate across multiple distributed ledger networks simultaneously.

The post Taurus Adds Hedera Smart Contracts to Close Banks’ Tokenization Gap appeared first on The Fintech Times.