What financial instruments are under development for Bitcoin? I'm thinking here specifically of instruments that take a Bitcoin-like approach to trusted parties, eliminating them wherever possible and typically built with Bitcoin as their platform.  (As opposed to simply having a real-world trusted entity issue a Bitcoin-containing or Bitcoin-related financial instrument in the traditional method).

Financial instruments include things like bonds, stocks, contracts, additional currencies, etc.

For example, I know jgarzik was working on smartcoin for a while (has development stopped?) and there are things like this you can do with coloured coins.  Can anyone offer some insight on what is actually being developed re: these and other approaches, and especially what has reached an implemented, usable level?
Lots of people that we know about and probably many more that we don't know about are developing a diversity of financial instruments for bitcoin. What instruments exactly will depend on your definition of instrument.

Here is an interesting one:

cvToken:
An effort to stabilize the bitcoin price by pegging a token backed by a basket of commodities to it.