IBM’s on-premises Digital Asset Haven arrives in beta after missing its Q2 2026 target

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced an on-premises beta of Digital Asset Haven on Thursday, permitting banks and governments to operate the digital asset platform on their own hardware.

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

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

IBM said that banks run it on their own IBM Z or LinuxONE mainframes, not in a public cloud.

The keys that sign transactions are kept safe in Crypto Express chips that are built into those machines. One thing that keeps live, test, and development systems separate is confidential computing. An IBM tool called the Offline Signing Orchestrator takes care of offline cold storage.

IBM says that some configurations can offer “99.999999% availability.”

Banking institutions can easily switch between on-premises, SaaS, and hybrid editions because all three share the same APIs and workflows, according to the company.

Since Haven’s launch in October 2025, banks and payment firms on multiple continents have launched digital asset projects on the cloud-based versions, IBM said.

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

IBM put out a beta version of a Swift integration as well. A bank already sends payment messages, but an ISO 20022 adapter turns them into tokenized deposit orders on Swift’s shared ledger.

IBM said that lenders in Swift’s program have tried using Haven to test deposit tokens on the ledger. No matter what time the ledger moves deposits, however, settlement still happens in the systems that banks use today.

Wells Fargo and Citi are also in another rival group with JPMorgan and Bank of America that’s planning its own deposit token network with The Clearing House for the first half of 2027.