Colombia drafts digital-asset bill with tokenized securities rules

Colombia is putting pen to paper on digital assets. Mariana Aya Guerrero, acting director of the Unidad de Regulación Financiera (URF), said the agency is drafting a digital-asset bill together with the Ministerio de Hacienda, Banco de la República and other state authorities, according to tokenpost.com.

The draft lays out ground rules rather than guesses. It would specify which digital-asset activities need authorization, set the conditions operators must meet, hand out regulatory responsibilities across agencies, and spell out penalties for those who step out of line.

Tokenized securities sit at the center of the plan. The bill would change how ownership gets registered and how orders are handled, cleared and settled — functions that tokenization could bundle onto one platform and run with smart contracts.

A separate track looks at distributed ledger technology for securities trading. Per the report, DLT infrastructure could open the door to round-the-clock trading and faster settlement, squeezing out the lag that traditional market plumbing carries.

Nothing is law yet. The proposal is still being developed, and any approval would have to survive the legislative process — meaning the timeline belongs to Congress, not the regulator.