Braga's Token Trust Becomes the First CMVM-Authorised Tokenisation Platform for Portuguese Shares and Bonds — Paulo Cardoso do Amaral's DLT Issuance-Trading-Settlement Stack Targets the €10 Trillion Pool of European Low-Yield Savings

The Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários has authorised Token Trust, a Braga-based fintech, to operate Portugal's first regulated platform for the tokenisation of shares and bonds. The CMVM green light puts Token Trust into a category of supervised issuance-and-settlement infrastructure that, before this week, did not exist in the Portuguese market. The company is led by three co-founders — Paulo Cardoso do Amaral, Patrícia Santos and Alberto Amaral — and frames its commercial pitch around the €10 trillion that sits in low-yield European household savings accounts, money the founders argue is structurally under-deployed in capital-markets exposure.

What is being authorised

The CMVM authorisation covers two regulated activities running on the same distributed-ledger-technology spine: the tokenisation of shares (representação digital de ações) and bonds (representação digital de obrigações), and the secondary trading and settlement of those tokens on the platform itself. The technical architecture consolidates issuance, trading and settlement into a single stack — what in the legacy market is split across an issuer registrar, a regulated venue and a central securities depository — and is the feature the founders flag as the source of cost compression. The platform is built on a permissioned ledger, not a public blockchain.

Where it sits in the European regulatory tape

Token Trust's CMVM file does not move under the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation (MiCA), which covers crypto-assets that are not financial instruments. Tokenised shares and bonds remain financial instruments under MiFID II and so fall under the EU DLT Pilot Regime — Regulation (EU) 2022/858 — which sets a sandbox for DLT-based market infrastructures with derogations from CSDR and MiFIR. Portugal has not, until now, hosted a domestic firm operating inside the Pilot Regime envelope; the closest European peers are the German fintech 21X and the Italian DLT-MTF run by Cassa Centrale Banca. Token Trust enters with a Portuguese law-of-issuance product, which removes one layer of cross-border friction for Portuguese SMEs that might use the platform for primary-market raises.

The €10 trillion target market

The founders' headline figure — €10 trillion in low-yield European household savings — is the same number ESMA and the European Commission have cited when arguing the case for the Capital Markets Union. The Token Trust pitch is that DLT-based, instant, low-cost trading lowers the access barrier for retail and small-corporate investors to a level the current European market structure does not deliver. The platform's economics depend on volume: the marginal cost of a tokenised trade on a permissioned ledger is fractions of a cent, but only if the venue accretes enough listings to make secondary liquidity self-sustaining.

What lands next

Token Trust has not yet published its launch issuance schedule. The CMVM authorisation is the regulatory gate; the commercial gate is the first listed issuer, which in the European DLT-Pilot peer set has tended to be a regional SME or municipal issuer placing a five-to-ten-million-euro bond. Portugal has a deep mid-market issuer base — the Bolsa de Lisboa lost much of its second-tier issuer pipeline through the 2014-2018 delisting cycle — and a Braga-based fintech with a CMVM authorisation and DLT-Pilot infrastructure is the first credible domestic vehicle to bring some of that pipeline back. Whether Lisbon develops a tokenisation cluster around the new permission, or whether Token Trust remains the only authorised operator for the foreseeable future, depends now on how the CMVM scales its supervisory capacity through the rest of 2026.

Sources: Jornal de Negócios, 10-11 May 2026; CMVM authorisations register; EU Regulation 2022/858 (DLT Pilot Regime); ESMA capital-markets statistics.