Egypt's Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA) has admitted asset manager GRANITE Financial Holding and blockchain firm Tarmiiz into its regulatory sandbox to test whether a distributed ledger can take over record-keeping now handled by a fund administrator, according to Daily News Egypt. The pilot tokenises ownership of a money-market fund and tracks it on a blockchain running alongside Granite's existing, centralised record system.
A fund administrator normally does specific, unglamorous work: valuing a fund's holdings, keeping the register of who owns what, calculating net asset value and producing the records that investors and the regulator rely on. Granite and Tarmiiz are testing whether a blockchain can take over at least part of that job.
Money-market funds specifically pool investor cash into short-term, low-risk instruments and are typically valued daily, which is part of why they make a plausible first test case for real-time, ledger-based record-keeping.
The test is live, not theoretical. Granite's pilot fund started with EGP 1 in assets, already fractionalised on the ledger — meaning each unit of the fund is represented and transferred as a token rather than as an entry in a separate share register — and the company is running its existing centralised fund-administration system in parallel with the new distributed-ledger version, reconciling the two every day, according to Enterprise.
What the sandbox permits
The sandbox lets Granite and Tarmiiz run that test under live regulatory oversight rather than only in a lab. Nodes on the ledger sit with Granite, the fund's custodian, the fund administrator and the FRA itself, which gets a real-time read of the ledger instead of a periodic report from the administrator, Enterprise reported. That makes it a permissioned ledger rather than a public one, visible only to those four parties — which is what lets the regulator read it directly instead of waiting on a report.
This is the first redundancy, the first casualty of using blockchain. — Hisham Akram, Founder and CEO, Granite Financial Holding
The comment is a direct claim about what changes first if the model works: not the custodian, not the regulator, but the administrator's function itself.
How the pilot is built
The mechanics are deliberately conservative. The centralised system stays the system of record while the blockchain version runs alongside it, and the two are checked against each other daily. A clean reconciliation, in practice, means the two report the same ownership and the same balances every day without a manual correction — the bar Akram has set before the trial counts as technical proof that the ledger version works. He expects that to take roughly a couple of months, according to Enterprise.
It is a very powerful thing, because you cannot tamper with data. — Hisham Akram, Founder and CEO, Granite Financial Holding
Nothing about the custodian or the administrator disappears during the test itself — both keep their existing nodes and their existing role in the parallel run. That is a deliberate design choice: rather than switching over and hoping the new system works, Granite is keeping the original version running until the ledger has proven itself against it, day by day, for months. What changes, if the reconciliation holds, is which system ends up treated as authoritative once the sandbox phase ends.
What Tarmiiz and the FRA say they are testing for
Tarmiiz is the blockchain technology partner on the pilot; its chairperson and co-founder, Amr Soliman, framed the sandbox admission as a way to surface the practical requirements before any rule changes are proposed.
The FRA's own framing is similar. Ahmed Khalifa, the Executive Director of the Regulatory Sandbox and the FRA's Chief Data Officer, described the sandbox as the formal channel meant to let financial technology companies trial products under supervision rather than outside the regulatory perimeter altogether, according to Daily News Egypt.
The sandbox's numbers, and the global comparison
The Granite-Tarmiiz pilot is one of only two sandbox projects to have reached actual testing, according to Daily News Egypt:
- 50+ project applications received by the FRA's Regulatory Sandbox since it launched
- 9 of those applications have preliminary approval
- 2 have advanced to the actual testing phase, including the Granite-Tarmiiz pilot
The stated purpose reaches beyond this one fund. The FRA has framed the pilot as one input into wider adoption of tokenisation across Egypt's capital markets and non-bank financial services sector more broadly, according to Daily News Egypt.
Tokenised money-market products are not new elsewhere. BlackRock and Franklin Templeton already run tokenised money-market funds that have attracted billions of dollars in assets under management, according to Enterprise. Those are established products already holding investor money; Granite's is a sandbox trial that started with a single fund holding EGP 1.
Whether it goes further depends on whether the daily reconciliation between the two systems holds up over the couple of months Akram has set as the technical bar. If it does, Granite's pilot becomes something other Egyptian asset managers could point to when they apply to the same sandbox, rather than a proposal on paper. It would also leave the FRA as one of a small number of emerging-market regulators to have run its own node on a private tokenisation trial, rather than only approving one after the fact. For now, the test remains confined to a single pilot fund and a sandbox environment — a controlled setting the FRA can end before any of it reaches the wider market.
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