What are the common challenges startups face in equity tokenisation?

The most common challenges include navigating FCA regulatory requirements, selecting the right tokenisation platform, structuring the legal framework for tokenised equity, educating investors unfamiliar with digital securities, and ensuring compliance with the UK Digital Securities Sandbox rules.

What are tokenisation platforms and how do they work?

Tokenisation platforms are regulated technology providers that convert equity or other assets into digital tokens on a blockchain or distributed ledger. In the UK, platforms operating under FCA oversight include those participating in the Digital Securities Sandbox. They handle the technical issuance, custody, and transfer of tokenised securities.

What financial insights should founders know before tokenising equity?

Founders should understand the cost structure of tokenisation (legal, platform, and compliance fees), the valuation implications of fractional ownership, how tokenised equity differs from traditional equity crowdfunding, and the tax treatment of digital securities under UK law.

What investor strategies apply to tokenised equity?

Investors in tokenised equity can benefit from fractional ownership of high-value assets, improved liquidity through secondary market trading on regulated platforms, portfolio diversification across early-stage UK startups, and participation in deals previously accessible only to institutional investors.

What is the UK regulatory landscape for equity tokenisation?

The UK regulatory landscape is governed primarily by the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) and HM Treasury. Key frameworks include the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023, the Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS), and ongoing FCA consultations on the treatment of tokenised securities. The UK is positioning itself as a global leader in regulated digital securities.

What is equity tokenisation?

Equity tokenisation is the process of converting ownership rights in a company into digital tokens recorded on a blockchain or distributed ledger. These tokens represent shares or equity stakes and can be transferred, traded, or held digitally, subject to regulatory compliance. In the UK, tokenised equity is treated as a regulated financial instrument under FCA oversight.

Digital Securities for UK Startups

Latest Headline

Wiltshire Brewer Wadworth Becomes First Company to Trade Shares on Asset Match's PISCES Platform

Private company shareholders in the UK have a new, concrete answer to the question of when they can actually sell, and the first company to test it is not a startup at all, which is exactly why founders should pay attention.

INVESTING AND FINANCE

Shawn Jhanji

3 days ago3 min read

Private company shareholders in the UK have a new, concrete answer to the question of when they can actually sell, and the first company to test it is not a startup at all, which is exactly why founders should pay attention. Wadworth, the Wiltshire brewer that has been family connected since 1875, will run the first live trading auction on Asset Match's PISCES platform, opening on 11 August and running until 30 September. Asset Match received its FCA approval to operate a PISCES platform in April, becoming one of four approved operators alongside the London Stock Exchange's Private Securities Market, JP Jenkins and Vestd. What happened PISCES, the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System, allows private companies to run scheduled trading windows for their shares in a regulated environment, without the continuous trading or public disclosure obligations of a full listing. Wadworth's shareholders, many of whom have held stock for years with no realistic route

RWA & TOKENISATION

CoinMarketCap has expanded its professional data API with seven new endpoints dedicated to real world assets, giving developers and institutions a single reference point for tracking tokenised stocks, government bonds, exchange traded funds and real estate as the on-chain RWA market approaches 34 billion dollars. The expansion, announced on 7 August, adds asset-list and quotes endpoints that return aggregate tokenised price, market capitalisation and 24 hour trading volume, alongside market-pairs and issuer endpoints that expose the underlying on-chain tokens, the venues they trade on and the companies issuing them. Core endpoints sit on CoinMarketCap's free Basic plan, lowering the barrier for smaller platforms and analysts to build on top of the data rather than scraping it from individual chains. For UK founders, investors and the platforms serving them, this is a small but telling signal. As tokenised equity, fund and bond markets mature under the FCA's fund tokenisation guid

CoinMarketCap - Seven New Enpoints Dedicated to Real World Assets.

CoinMarketCap has expanded its professional data API with seven new endpoints dedicated to real world assets, giving developers and institutions a single reference point for tracking tokenised stocks, government bonds, exchange traded funds and real estate as the on-chain RWA market approaches 34 bi

Shawn Jhanji

1 hour ago3 min read

tZERO has unveiled a next generation version of its tokenised securities platform, bringing onboarding, investing, trading, custody and payments together into a single connected experience rather than the fragmented set of tools that has typically greeted new investors in digital securities. The launch, announced on 6 August, is one of the clearest signals yet that the tokenisation sector is moving from proving the technology works to competing on the ordinary things that decide whether any financial product gets adopted: how easy it is to open an account, fund it and actually trade. For UK founders and investors watching the sector from the outside, the detail that matters most is not so much the rebrand, which is a significant upgrade, but the shift in what tZERO is now selling. Previously the company's tokenised securities infrastructure was something broker-dealers and issuers bought into piece by piece, with a legacy user base, language and UX focused on the 'crypto and blo

tZero Unveils Unified Platform Merging Onboarding, Trading and Custody for Tokenised Securities

tZERO has unveiled a next generation version of its tokenised securities platform, bringing onboarding, investing, trading, custody and payments together into a single connected experience rather than the fragmented set of tools that has typically greeted new investors in digital securities. The lau

Shawn Jhanji

3 days ago3 min read

Britain opened July accused of being behind on tokenisation. It closed the month with its biggest institutional coalition yet, a date for its first digital bond, and the world's largest custody bank moving fund ownership onto a blockchain. UK The month's UK story is really one long rebuttal, delivered in real time, to a single sentence. On 6 July, UK Finance published a report written by Oliver Wyman with a blunt headline finding: Britain is behind other jurisdictions on securities tokenisation, with most live issuance and pilot activity so far happening elsewhere, particularly the US. What followed reads like an answer. The next day, at the London Blockchain Institutional Tokenisation Summit hosted by DLA Piper, the mood in a room full of asset managers, custodians and lawyers was practical and quietly confident rather than anxious. The consensus was that the technology already works and the real blockers are regulatory certainty, compliance and security, areas where the UK's

Equity Rewired: the monthly tokenisation roundup.

July 2026 in Review. Britain opened July accused of being behind on tokenisation. It closed the month with its biggest institutional coalition yet, a date for its first digital bond, and the world's largest custody bank moving fund ownership onto a blockchain. UK The month's UK story is really one long rebuttal, delivered in real time, to a single sentence. On 6 July, UK Finance published a report written by Oliver Wyman with a blunt headline finding: Britain is behind other

Shawn Jhanji

5 days ago8 min read

INVESTING & FINANCE

For a founder building outside London, the hardest part of raising is rarely the pitch. It is getting in front of the right person at all. Warm introductions cluster around a handful of postcodes, and the funds with cheques to write are disproportionately based in the capital. A new £100 million commitment from HM Treasury and the British Business Bank is aimed squarely at that structural gap, and it is worth founders outside the traditional hubs paying attention to where the money is actually going. The £100 million is the second tranche of the Investor Pathways Capital Initiative, a £400 million programme designed to seed early stage venture funds run by first time and emerging managers based outside London and the South East. It follows an initial £90 million deployment in June 2026 to the programme's first cohort. Announcing the extension alongside visits to businesses and investors in Sheffield and Leeds, Chancellor John Healey and Economic Secretary to the Treasury Lucy Rigby

Treasury and British Business Bank Commit a Further £100 Million to Early Stage Regional Venture Funds

For a founder building outside London, the hardest part of raising is rarely the pitch. It is getting in front of the right person at all. Warm introductions cluster around a handful of postcodes, and the funds with cheques to write are disproportionately based in the capital. A new £100 million com

Shawn Jhanji

2 hours ago3 min read

Four operators are now live, a handful of household name private companies have run their first trading events, and the regulatory sandbox has five years left to run. On paper, PISCES looks like a UK reform that is working. However, look at what the lawyers advising the companies actually running these events are saying, and the picture is less settled than the headline transactions suggest. PISCES, the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System, now has four approved operators: the London Stock Exchange's Private Securities Market, JP Jenkins' Private Market, Vestd and Asset Match. The LSE, JP Jenkins and Asset Match, have all run trading events since March, with Wiltshire brewer Wadworth the latest as the first company to trade through Asset Match, with an auction running from 11 August to 30 September. Moneybox and the AI company Wayve have both used the framework for employee tender offers, the latter in an 85 million dollar transaction that ranks among the

Lawyers Flag Practical Complexities Behind PISCES's Early Trades as the Private Share Market Builds Toward Its 2030 Sandbox Deadline

Three operators are now live, a handful of household name private companies have run their first trading events, and the regulatory sandbox has five years left to run. On paper, PISCES looks like a UK reform that is working. Look at what the lawyers advising the companies actually running these even

Shawn Jhanji

3 days ago4 min read

Wiltshire Brewer Wadworth Becomes First Company to Trade Shares on Asset Match's PISCES Platform

Shawn Jhanji

3 days ago3 min read

Startup News

London's own share of UK equity investment has been falling, down to around 57% in 2025 from 60% the year before, but that still means well over half of all deal value flows to founders in one corner of the country. Beauhurst has separately found that accelerator programmes, often a founder's first structured route into an investor network, are just as concentrated, with nearly three fifths of all UK programmes based in London and every other region trailing far behind. Extend Ventures' long running research into ethnicity and venture funding found that between 2009 and 2019 just 0.24% of UK venture capital went to teams of Black entrepreneurs, and that Black and multi ethnic founders collectively received around 1.7% of capital despite representing roughly 14% of the population. None of this is really a story about investors being unwilling to fund good ideas. It is a story about who those investors ever hear from in the first place. Deal flow in venture capital has always run

Scout networks and regional funds are rewiring who gets access to UK venture capital

There is a version of the UK funding gap story that gets told constantly, and it is true. Female founders raise less. Black and ethnic minority founders raise a fraction of what their numbers in the population would predict. Founders outside London and the South East compete for a shrinking share of

Shawn Jhanji

2 hours ago5 min read

Most of the debate about who gets funded starts and ends with the initial cheque: who wins the pitch, whose warm introduction lands, which fund says yes. It is the right place to start, but it stops the story too early. A less visible shift is under way further up the capital stack, in how venture funds themselves are structured, and it may end up mattering just as much to founders as anything happening at the term sheet stage. The problem, briefly, in data Global secondary deal volume for private assets hit a record 226 billion dollars in 2025, up 41 per cent on the previous year, with nearly half of that volume coming from general partner led transactions rather than ordinary LP to LP trades. The gravy train continues. Continuation funds, where a GP moves one or more prized assets out of an ageing fund into a new vehicle so it can keep managing them for another three to seven years, now account for roughly 75 per cent of all GP led secondary volume. Close to three quarte

UK Venture Funds Turn to Evergreen Structures and GP-Led Secondaries. Case is Building for Tokenised Liquidity at the Fund Level

Most of the debate about who gets funded starts and ends with the initial cheque: who wins the pitch, whose warm introduction lands, which fund says yes. It is the right place to start, but it stops the story too early. A less visible shift is under way further up the capital stack, in how venture f

Shawn Jhanji

3 days ago5 min read

For founders trying to read the mood of the market this year, the number to watch is not a valuation. It is how much dry powder the funds backing them are sitting on. Index Ventures has just given the clearest signal yet that the answer, at least at the top of the market, is a great deal more than a year ago. The London and San Francisco based firm confirmed on Friday that it has raised 2 billion dollars in fresh capital across three vehicles: a 400 million dollar seed fund, a 900 million dollar venture fund, and a 700 million dollar top up to its growth fund, which now stands at 2.2 billion dollars. Combined with capital raised earlier, Index says its total available investing capacity across seed, venture and growth stages now sits at 3.5 billion dollars. The timing is notable. The raise lands soon after Index booked one of the standout exits of the cycle: portfolio company Wiz's 32 billion dollar sale to Alphabet, a payout that gave limited partners fresh proof that European a

Index Ventures Raises $2 Billion Across Three New Funds, Taking Its Total Firepower to $3.5 Billion

For founders trying to read the mood of the market this year, the number to watch is not a valuation. It is how much dry powder the funds backing them are sitting on. Index Ventures has just given the clearest signal yet that the answer, at least at the top of the market, is a great deal more than a

Shawn Jhanji

Aug 33 min read

Law & regulation

For anyone in the UK still waiting to see whether tokenisation talk turns into tokenisation infrastructure, 13 July gave the clearest answer so far. Chris Woolard CBE, HM Treasury's Wholesale Digital Markets Champion, published his first report to the Chancellor, and it arrives with a taskforce of 54 firms behind it, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and UBS. The group is backed by the City of London Corporation and will spend the next year working on live tokenisation use cases across UK financial markets, starting with tokenised repo. Woolard, who spent eight years as chair of the Financial Conduct Authority before taking on the Champion role in April, is addressing the report to whoever holds the Chancellor's job next, a reminder that this is being built to outlast any one minister. The headline numbers are designed to focus minds. Woolard's report estimates that wider tokenisation could add up to £33 billion to UK annual economic output and £1

UK Launches 54-Firm Tokenisation Taskforce Led by Chris Woolard and Wall Street Giants

The group is backed by the City of London Corporation and will spend the next year working on live tokenisation use cases across UK financial markets, starting with tokenised repo. Woolard, who spent eight years as chair of the Financial Conduct Authority before taking on the Champion role in April, is addressing the report to whoever holds the Chancellor's job next, a reminder that this is being built to outlast any one minister. The headline numbers are designed to focus mi

Shawn Jhanji

Jul 134 min read

The story of UK tokenisation this year has been a story of vision documents. On 18 May the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England, with the Prudential Regulation Authority alongside them, published a joint Call for Input titled The Future of Tokenisation, setting out how they think tokenised assets should be issued, traded and settled across UK wholesale markets. The window for responses closed on 3 July. On 6 July the industry body CryptoUK published its own submission, and buried in it is the question every founder and adviser watching this space should care about: not what the regulators want to build, but when, in what order, and who owns each piece.

CryptoUK Urges FCA and Bank of England to Publish a Tokenisation Delivery Map as It Files Its Call for Input Response

CryptoUK is the trade association for the UK cryptoasset and digital finance sector, and its response is worth reading precisely because it stops short of applause. The vision, it agrees, is the right one. Tokenisation can cut reconciliation costs, speed up settlement and collateral movement, strengthen ownership records and open up new issuance and post trade models. The practical issue, as CryptoUK frames it, is whether any of that can be translated into the concrete things

Shawn Jhanji

Jul 84 min read

Founder studying a map while overlooking a vast maze leading towards London's financial district, symbolising the new FCA and Bank of England regulatory roadmap for tokenisation, digital assets and UK startup finance.

What the FCA and Bank of England's 30 June Package Means for Tokenisation Founders and Investors.

For years, anyone building in tokenisation in the UK has had to plan around a moving target. The rules were coming, everyone agreed, but their shape was a matter of consultation papers and educated guesses. That ended on 30 June, when the Financial Conduct Authority published the final rules and gui

Luca Bellavita

Jul 25 min read

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THE LEGAL VIEW

As the equities markets are generally moving towards tokenisation, a common question is how the marketing of tokenised equity differs from traditional equity. In this respect, it is a mistake to focus on the “tokenised” element of tokenised equity. In the UK, tokenisation does not, from a purely legal analysis, expand the target market to whom shares can be sold. Where a token represents rights to, or interests in, an underlying share, it is very likely going to be treated as a security under UK law. This means the same regulatory framework that applies to traditional securities also governs the categories of investors to whom tokenised equity may be offered or sold. In this respect, the rules that govern marketing into the UK are deliberately broad in scope and can apply even where the issuer is based overseas, provided the relevant communications are capable of having an effect in the UK. As such, before marketing or selling tokenised equity to UK investors, firms should carefu

Borderless Assets, Not Borderless Investors: Who Can Invest in Tokenised Equity?

As the equities markets are generally moving towards tokenisation, a common question is how the marketing of tokenised equity differs from traditional equity. In this respect, it is a mistake to focus on the “tokenised” element of tokenised equity. In the UK, tokenisation does not, from a purely legal analysis, expand the target market to whom shares can be sold. Where a token represents rights to, or interests in, an underlying share, it is very likely going to be treated as

Jul 275 min read

Going down the rabbit hole: an introduction to tokenised equity

For founders and investors. If you are a founder weighing up whether to tokenise your equity, or an investor trying to work out what you would actually be buying, this is the place to start. From a legal perspective, it covers: how tokenised equity works, what changes, what does not, and where the rules are heading. Tokenisation is a concept often met with much hype and little knowledge. At its core it is simple. A cryptoasset token is just shorthand for data held on-chai

Jun 304 min read

Shifting sands: a potential new world order for RWAs

An RWA, or real world asset, is a cryptoasset that represents something that exists off the blockchain: a share, a bond, a building, even a stock of uranium. The idea has been around for a decade, but in recent months it has moved to the centre of the conversation. That is partly new use cases with real value, such as tokenised uranium, which allows investment without ever taking delivery. It is partly better infrastructure, such as stablecoins making settlement more reliab

Jun 105 min read

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Read Mopre Articles

CoinMarketCap - Seven New Enpoints Dedicated to Real World Assets.

UK Venture Funds Turn to Evergreen Structures and GP-Led Secondaries. Case is Building for Tokenised Liquidity at the Fund Level

Polymath's Bet: Compliance Belongs in the Protocol, Not the Smart Contract

Fragmentation across ERC 1400 and ERC 3643, where every platform ends up with its own proprietary compliance logic and vendor lock in, has become enough of a problem that competing platforms are now collaborating to fix it. Brickken, DigiShares, Bit2Me, Dekalabs, Hacken and several others, have backed ERC 7943, a new modular standard co authored by Brickken's Dario Lo Buglio, currently under review at the Ethereum Magicians forum. It separates identity, compliance and permiss

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Equity Rewired: the monthly tokenisation roundup.

Ripple Invests in UK Firms Zilo and Licuido to Expand Tokenised Collateral on the XRP Ledger

Two UK based tokenisation firms have just picked up Ripple as a shareholder rather than simply a partner, a sign of how much of the plumbing behind tokenised collateral markets is being built by British regulated firms rather than imported from elsewhere.

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