XDC Network

XDC Network names invoices, bills of lading, letters of credit and receivables as the trade instruments it tokenizes, and it puts the global trade finance gap at more than $2 trillion. According to XDC, small and medium-sized companies are disproportionately excluded from trade finance, and manual paperwork and slow settlement remain common. A tokenized receivable is one form of real-world asset tokenization and can be split into fractions, which opens it to more investors and to a secondary market.

A token replaces a paper document only when the law treats the electronic version like the original. The UK Electronic Trade Documents Act 2023 received Royal Assent on 20 July 2023 and came into force two months later. It covers bills of exchange, promissory notes, bills of lading, warehouse receipts and marine insurance policies, among other documents. An electronic document qualifies when a reliable system identifies it, protects it against unauthorized changes, lets only one person control it at a time and removes the control of the previous holder with each transfer.

XDC names the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records, MLETR, as the framework that gives digital trade documents legal recognition. UNCITRAL lists the United Kingdom among the states with laws based on that model, while Germany relies on its Commercial Code for the electronic bill of lading. Together with the International Trade and Forfaiting Association, the International Chamber of Commerce and TradeTrust, XDC develops XDSS-PQ, a standard for signing trade documents with post-quantum cryptography.

XDC Ventures, the investment arm of XDC Network, acquired Contour Network in October 2025. Contour runs a blockchain platform for digital letters of credit that a consortium of HSBC, Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas, Citi, DBS, ING, Bangkok Bank and CTBC Bank originally backed. For live trades in commodities and manufactured goods, Contour cut the processing time of a letter of credit from five to ten days to a few hours.

After the purchase, XDC Ventures announced a Stablecoin Lab that runs pilots with banks and companies on regulated stablecoin issuance and settlement. The lab also builds programming interfaces that settle a letter of credit in stablecoins and bring processing down from days to near real time. Ritesh Kakkad, co-founder of XDC Network and XDC Ventures, said that banks need settlement rails, treasury optimization and compliance frameworks, and that XDC builds all of them.

Since 17 September 2025, the stablecoin USDC from Circle has run natively on the XDC mainnet. The Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol CCTP V2 moves USDC between XDC Network and other blockchains without bridged or wrapped tokens.

On 24 February 2025, XDC Network launched its first four money market fund tokens with Archax, a digital asset exchange, broker and custodian regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority. The first four tokens represent money market funds from abrdn, Fidelity International, BlackRock and State Street.

In a pilot for physical trade, a receivable backed by a cacao shipment from the Philippines became a token on XDC Network. Blockticity issued certificates of authenticity for the farms and the shipment, Seedcore gathered the cacao and issued the asset, and Brickken ran the tokenization and the onboarding of investors. Investors can check the link between the token and the underlying shipment before they buy, and the project grew out of the accelerator partnership between the XDC Foundation and Plug and Play.

The Brazilian firm VERT Capital plans to tokenize up to $1 billion in debt and receivables on XDC Network. Mercado Bitcoin, also based in Brazil, issued tokenized fixed-income products backed by corporate debt on the network in 2025.

The XDC Foundation was formed in mid-2021 as an independent organization, funded by a grant from XinFin, the fintech company that began building the network in 2017. The foundation encourages development on the network and engages third parties to evaluate its infrastructure. XDC Network has run its public mainnet since 1 June 2019, two years before the foundation was formed.

Under the consensus mechanism XDPoS 2.0, holders of XDC vote for masternode candidates with their stake, and the 108 candidates with the most votes propose and sign blocks. A masternode needs at least 10 million XDC locked in its wallet and a completed KYC check, and standby nodes take over when a validator drops out. Republic, Clearpool, SBI VC and Deutsche Telekom have joined as institutional validators, and a node that misbehaves can lose part of its stake through slashing.

Besides the public mainnet, companies can run subnets with permissioned access and private data, which anchor their state to the mainnet through a checkpoint contract.

Investors in Switzerland and the European Union can hold XDC through an exchange-traded product from 21Shares, a crypto ETP issuer. The 21shares XDC Network Staking ETP trades under the ticker XDCN, is domiciled in Switzerland and carries the ISIN CH1464217285. The product holds its XDC physically with BitGo as custodian, adds staking rewards to its net asset value every day and charges a fee of 2.50 percent a year. Flow Traders makes the market in XDCN and is one of its two authorized participants.

For the European Union, the MiCA Crypto Alliance published a MiCA white paper for XDC under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation. MiCA requires such a disclosure document before a crypto-asset is offered to the public or admitted to trading in the EU.

XDC Network is used to tokenize trade finance assets such as invoices and receivables, to issue fund tokens and to settle payments in stablecoins such as USDC. Companies that need privacy can also run their own permissioned subnets, which anchor their state to the public mainnet.

XDC is the native coin of XDC Network and pays the transaction fees on the chain, which stay below $0.0001 for a simple transfer. Holders also stake XDC to vote for masternodes, and each masternode has to lock at least 10 million XDC.

XinFin is the fintech company that began developing XDC Network as an enterprise blockchain in 2017. In mid-2021 XinFin funded the independent XDC Foundation with a grant, and the foundation now supports the growth of the network.

Under XDPoS 2.0, block rewards go to the masternodes that produce blocks and to the XDC holders who voted for them with their stake. The network groups blocks into epochs of 900 blocks, and a masternode that misbehaves can lose part of its stake through slashing.

ISO 20022 is the messaging standard that Swift uses for cross-border payments and that the Eurosystem uses in its T2 payment system. XDC Network lists solutions that support ISO 20022 compatibility among its offers for trade finance.