# September 2026
Construction Blockchain Newsletter
September closes with a clearer shift from blockchain experimentation towards operational, regulated infrastructure. Central banks and market regulators are no longer discussing tokenisation only as a future possibility: settlement rails are going live, controlled trading environments are being authorised and institutions are testing how digital assets fit existing legal and financial systems. For construction, the relevance remains indirect but increasingly practical. Project payments, infrastructure finance, procurement, material provenance and lifecycle records all depend on trustworthy identities, authoritative data, enforceable rights and dependable settlement.
Worldwide, the BIS is taking Project Agorá into a second phase of wholesale cross-border payment research. Europe has moved further, with central-bank settlement and commercial-bank tokenised deposits entering live use. Hong Kong is linking digital bonds with tokenised commodity collateral and carbon assets. In North America, the SEC has opened a controlled route for tokenised US equities, while Brazil is proposing a DLT securities pilot and Ghana is advancing a comprehensive virtual-assets framework.
The Research Digest examines tokenised BIM twins, blockchain-enabled procurement and decentralised building logbooks, while the Events Agenda and Knowledge Upgrade focus on the governance and enterprise skills needed to assess these developments critically.
World & Blockchain
Worldwide
BIS takes Project Agorá into its second phase
Project Agorá is entering Phase Two after the BIS reported promising results from its first stage, while stressing that important questions remain. The initiative brings central and commercial banks together to explore tokenised commercial-bank deposits and central-bank reserves for wholesale cross-border payments. The BIS continues to distinguish this model from stablecoins, citing concerns around singleness of money, integrity and interoperability. For construction and infrastructure supply chains, the relevance is not a new payment token but the prospect of regulated, programmable cross-border settlement built on existing monetary institutions and capable of supporting higher-value enterprise transactions.
Europe
Europe moves tokenised money into live settlement
Europe moved beyond pilot design in late September. On 21 September, the Eurosystem launched Pontes, enabling wholesale tokenised assets to settle in central-bank money. On 24 September, UK Finance announced live customer transactions using tokenised sterling bank deposits, including two remortgage completions; the pilots also explored a future digital connection with HM Land Registry. These are different layers of the monetary system, but together they show regulated digital money entering operational workflows. For construction and real estate, conditional settlement linked to verified completion events is considerably more tangible than generic claims about “blockchain payments”, although scaling, governance and interoperability remain unresolved.
Asia, Middle East & Australia
Hong Kong links tokenisation with commodities and carbon assets
Hong Kong’s 16 September Policy Address set out an unusually integrated tokenisation programme. The Government intends to regularise digital-bond issuance, while the HKMA plans tests of tokenised Exchange Fund Bills. More directly relevant to the built environment, HKEX is targeting a 2027 pilot for tokenised warehouse-receipt financing using physical tracking technologies, alongside a blockchain-backed platform incorporating carbon credits and commodity warehouse receipts. The programme connects tokenisation with physical inventory, collateral and environmental assets. Its success will depend on reliable links between digital records and the underlying commodities rather than the ledger alone.
North America
US regulators open controlled pathways for on-chain markets
On 17 September, the US Securities and Exchange Commission granted temporary, conditional relief allowing specified Tokenized Securities Venues to trade certain tokenised US-listed shares through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools. Conditions include equivalent shareholder rights, issuer notification, auditable smart contracts, volume limits and synchronised trading halts. On 24 September, the CFTC also clarified that tokenised forms of permitted investments can be relevant to customer-fund rules and that blockchain may satisfy some recordkeeping requirements. Together, these actions show regulators adapting existing controls to on-chain infrastructure rather than treating tokenisation as a separate legal universe.
South America
Brazil proposes DLT pilot across the securities lifecycle
Brazil’s Comissão de Valores Mobiliários announced on 16 September that its Tokenisation Working Group had submitted a draft resolution for the proposed Programa Piloto DLT CVM. The pilot would permit experimental issuance, offering, distribution, trading, bookkeeping, custody, central depository and settlement of securities using distributed-ledger networks. It is not yet an operational programme, and that distinction matters. The proposal is intended to test technical, operational and legal feasibility, interoperability, vulnerabilities and possible regulatory gaps. For real estate and infrastructure finance, its scope is notable because the experiments would cover the securities lifecycle rather than token issuance alone.
Africa
Ghana advances comprehensive virtual-assets regulatory framework
On 28 September, the Bank of Ghana published a market update on progress towards a comprehensive regulatory framework for virtual-asset activities. The Bank, Securities and Exchange Commission and Financial Intelligence Centre have stated that virtual assets cannot remain outside Ghana’s financial regulatory perimeter; the authorities estimate that the domestic ecosystem now includes more than three million users. The development is primarily regulatory rather than a signal of institutional construction adoption. Its relevance is that digital settlement and tokenised assets require licensing, financial-integrity controls and clear supervisory responsibility before they can credibly support enterprise or infrastructure transactions.
Research & Development Digest
From trusted records to executable construction workflows
This monthly Research Digest features three newly published studies examining blockchain not as a standalone ledger, but as part of wider construction information, procurement and digital-twin architectures.
A Monte Carlo enhanced agent based model for Tokenized BIM Twin (TBT) resource reallocation in construction projects
Celik Y; Cadirci MS, 2026.
Published on 29 September in Scientific Reports, this paper proposes a three-layer Tokenized BIM Twin framework combining an IFC-based BIM layer for resource tokenisation, a real-time digital twin for detecting deviations, and blockchain smart contracts for transparent resource reallocation. The authors evaluate the approach computationally using agent-based simulation and 150 Monte Carlo iterations across each of three configurations: traditional management, centralised BIM plus digital twin, and the TBT framework. Under the modelled conditions, TBT substantially reduced simulated schedule overrun, resource idle rates and disruption-response time. The result is interesting for construction management because it tests blockchain as part of a dynamic control architecture rather than merely as a document ledger. The limitation is equally important: these are simulated outcomes, not evidence from a live construction project. The paper therefore demonstrates technical and analytical potential, but empirical validation, integration costs, governance and contractual consequences still need to be tested in practice.
DOI 10.1038/s41598-026-66059-2
ProcuTrust: A trustworthy procurement and management system for building services by enabling blockchain integration
Hewavitharana S; Perera S; Jin X; Seneviratne K; Bamdad K, 2026.
Published online by the ASCE Journal of Construction Engineering and Management on 24 September, ProcuTrust addresses procurement and management of building-services systems, where multiple stakeholders, extensive documentation and complex workflows create persistent coordination problems. The authors develop a blockchain-enabled approach intended to support secure, transparent and automated transactions through distributed records and smart contracts. Its construction relevance is direct: building services procurement involves approvals, product information, supply-chain records, contractual obligations and handover evidence that frequently pass between organisations and systems. A blockchain layer may strengthen auditability where participants need a shared history of transactions, but immutability does not remove the need for agreed data ownership, verification or exception management. The paper is therefore most useful as a sector-specific investigation of where blockchain can sit within procurement governance, rather than as evidence that decentralisation by itself resolves fragmented construction processes.
DOI 10.1061/JCEMD4.COENG-18937
Leveraging IFC semantics and W3C decentralized identifiers for Digital Building Logbooks in construction and deep renovation
Kochovski P; Fujs D; Vavpotič D; Chiachío J; Miri P; Stankovski V, 2026.
This Automation in Construction paper presents BUILDCHAIN DBL, a decentralised Digital Building Logbook architecture combining an IFC-aligned ontology, a blockchain layer using W3C Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials, and an application layer for credential management and lifecycle monitoring. The authors validate the architecture through a real-world case study at Hospital Real in Granada, Spain, reporting credential-based workflows within interactive latency thresholds below 300 milliseconds. The contribution is especially relevant to construction because it tackles a harder problem than ledger immutability: how heterogeneous BIM, sensor, inspection and regulatory information can remain both semantically interoperable and independently verifiable. The use of IFC semantics, decentralised identity and verifiable credentials also connects building records to emerging digital-identity standards. However, technical feasibility in a case study does not establish organisational scalability; governance, long-term credential stewardship, platform dependencies and alignment with authoritative public and asset-management records remain important implementation questions.
Events Agenda
CBC 2026
Construction Blockchain Conference 2026
5–6 November 2026 — Virtual, hosted from London, UK
CBC2026 examines disruptive technologies against enduring built-environment problems including fragmented supply chains, interoperability, productivity, decarbonisation, cybersecurity and trusted digital governance. The programme combines keynotes, industry cases and research across six themes: transparency and trust, efficiency and automation, collaborative governance, data security, integrated approaches and sustainability. Blockchain is considered alongside AI, digital twins, smart contracts, BIM, IoT and enterprise systems rather than in isolation. That makes the conference particularly relevant to researchers, clients, practitioners, policymakers and technology providers trying to distinguish measurable value from technology-led claims and to understand how emerging technologies fit wider organisational and information architectures.
Singapore FinTech Festival 2026
18–20 November 2026 — Singapore EXPO, Singapore
Singapore FinTech Festival brings together policymakers, financial institutions, technology companies, investors and researchers around the changing infrastructure of finance. The 2026 agenda is particularly relevant to this month’s theme: it includes sessions on real-world assets and tokenisation, cross-border wholesale connectivity, digital currencies, DeFi–TradFi integration and regulatory coordination. For built-environment organisations, the event offers a view of the financial rails on which future tokenised project finance, collateral and payments would depend. It is therefore most useful not as a construction event, but as a place to test construction assumptions against the institutions actually designing and regulating emerging digital-finance infrastructure.
TechFest 2026
25 November 2026 — Hilton London Metropole, London, UK
Powered by Construction News and New Civil Engineer, TechFest brings technology discussion back into the operational context of construction and civil engineering. The programme focuses on the application of technology and innovation across design, delivery, infrastructure and buildings, including AI, automation, digital delivery and low-carbon solutions. Clients, contractors, consultants, architects, technology providers and start-ups are represented. For CBC readers, its value is complementary to financial-sector events: it provides an opportunity to test whether ideas such as tokenisation, trusted data and automated transactions solve recognisable industry problems and integrate with the digital systems already being adopted by project and asset teams.
Knowledge Upgrade
New Finance: Unpacking DeFi, FinTech, Crypto & Blockchain
Provider: Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin
Format: Online, synchronous
Start date: 4 November 2026
Duration: Six evening sessions, concluding 9 December 2026
Trinity Business School’s programme provides a synchronous introduction to blockchain, cryptocurrency, digital assets and decentralised finance, with attention to governance, regulation, industry use cases and implementation risks. It is broader than construction and contains practical crypto-oriented content, so it should not be treated as built-environment training. Its value for construction leaders is more specific: developing enough technical and regulatory literacy to challenge tokenisation proposals, distinguish enterprise applications from speculation, and assess whether a blockchain-based use case has credible governance, commercial logic and implementation requirements.
Understanding Blockchain in Construction: A Practical Guide
Understanding Blockchain in Construction: A Practical Guide, is intended to address a persistent gap in the sector: the lack of practical, construction-focused material on blockchain that moves beyond general hype or purely financial use cases. The book examines how blockchain relates to trust, traceability, smart contracts, data exchange and implementation challenges across construction and infrastructure contexts.
