IBM (NYSE: IBM) has released an on-premises beta of Digital Asset Haven, allowing banks and governments to run the digital asset platform on their own hardware. The Sept. 24 announcement, made via IBM's official newsroom, arrived months after the second-quarter 2026 window the company had set when the platform launched in October 2025, as Cryptopolitan reported at the time.

The second quarter wrapped up in June, and the on-premises version remains in beta. IBM did not mention the original schedule in its Sept. 24 announcement.

Signing keys stay in Crypto Express chips on banks' own mainframes

According to IBM, banks run the platform on their own IBM Z or LinuxONE mainframes rather than in a public cloud. The keys that sign transactions are kept safe in Crypto Express chips built into those machines. Confidential computing keeps live, test, and development systems separate, while an IBM tool called the Offline Signing Orchestrator handles offline cold storage. For the banks and governments Haven targets, that places the hardware authorizing asset movements inside their own walls rather than in a provider's cloud.

IBM says some configurations can offer "99.999999% availability."

The company also said banking institutions can move easily between on-premises, SaaS, and hybrid editions because all three share the same APIs and workflows. Since Haven's launch in October 2025, banks and payment firms on multiple continents have launched digital asset projects on the cloud-based versions, according to IBM. Those shared APIs give existing cloud projects a direct path onto banks' own mainframes without being rebuilt.

Citi and Wells Fargo back both Swift's pilot and a rival 2027 network

IBM also put out a beta version of a Swift link. An ISO 20022 adapter turns the payment messages a bank already sends into tokenized deposit orders on Swift's shared ledger. IBM said lenders in Swift's program have tried using Haven to test deposit tokens on the ledger. No matter when the ledger moves deposits, however, settlement still happens in the systems banks use today — meaning the pilot layers tokenized deposits onto rails banks already run rather than replacing them.

The Swift integration forms part of IBM's expanded digital banking infrastructure push, according to the announcement.

In July, Cryptopolitan reported that seventeen banks, including Citi, HSBC, UBS, and Wells Fargo, signed up for Swift's tokenized deposit pilot. Wells Fargo and Citi are also part of a rival group alongside JPMorgan and Bank of America that is planning its own deposit token network with The Clearing House for the first half of 2027. The overlap means the same lenders are working tokenized deposits on two tracks at once — one already in on-ledger testing, the other with a dated launch window still ahead.