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.

Five Announcements, One Direction: What the Last Month of Tokenisation News Is Actually Telling UK Founders

Shawn Jhanji
Jun 15
5 min read

A few weeks ago, anyone tracking tokenisation news would have watched five significant announcements land in quick succession.

DTCC confirmed a July pilot for live tokenised securities trades, with a full commercial launch in October.
Ondo Finance's tokenised stocks platform passed $1 billion in total value locked, the first to do it in under eight months.
The SEC moved to draft a formal framework for tokenised equities.
The FCA and Bank of England published a joint vision for tokenisation in UK wholesale markets.
The Prudential Regulation Authority wrote to every UK bank CEO about their exposure to digital assets.

Five announcements, from five different parts of the institutional landscape, in roughly four weeks. Taken one at a time, each is a news story. Taken together, they tell a single coherent story.

Three weeks on, nothing has reversed that direction. If anything, it has sharpened. This piece is about what the story actually is, and what it means if you are building a company or backing one.

The infrastructure is becoming real

For most of 2023 and 2024, the tokenisation conversation ran on projections and pilots. McKinsey's $16 trillion market by 2030. Bank proofs of concept that never reached production. Consultations with no output. The gap between the narrative and the working infrastructure was wide enough to justify genuine scepticism.

What is different now is that the plumbing is being built in places where it cannot easily be unbuilt. DTCC is not a startup running an experiment. It is the organisation that settles the vast majority of US securities transactions. Its tokenisation service starts with a limited production pilot in July 2026 and a full commercial launch in October, built with a working group of more than 50 financial firms and backed by a three-year no-action letter from the SEC. It will begin with highly liquid assets: Russell 1000 equities, major index ETFs and US Treasury bills. When the clearing house at the centre of US markets commits at that level, the question stops being whether institutional tokenisation happens. It becomes what shape it takes, on what timeline, and who builds the services around it.

The rest of the infrastructure is just as concrete. JPMorgan's Kinexys platform settled a cross-border tokenised Treasury redemption in under five seconds, alongside Mastercard and Ripple. That happened. The New York Stock Exchange, through ICE, is developing its own tokenised securities platform for round-the-clock trading and on-chain settlement, and has signed Securitize as its first digital transfer agent. These are not slide decks. They are systems being wired together.

What the regulatory signals actually mean

The FCA and Bank of England joint vision, the PRA letter to bank CEOs, and the SEC framework are three separate signals from three different regulators. They share one subtext: the authorities have decided tokenisation is happening, and their job now is to manage how, not whether.

The FCA and Bank of England document is explicitly forward-looking. It sets out shared principles and an initial roadmap covering prudential treatment, tokenised collateral and settlement instruments, and invites feedback to shape a full cross-authority roadmap due later this year. The Call for Input closes on 3 July 2026. If you are building in this space, that deadline is the last clean window to influence the framework before it sets.

The PRA letter is a different kind of signal. Writing to bank CEOs about digital asset exposure is supervisory communication, not cheerleading. It means the regulator now considers the exposure material enough to warrant explicit oversight. That is the moment an emerging technology becomes an established risk category in the regulatory mind.

There is a UK layer underneath all of this that matters more to founders and investors than the wholesale-markets headline suggests. The FCA's consultations on the wider cryptoasset regime are now substantively complete, with policy statements expected this summer and the authorisations gateway opening on 30 September 2026. The Bank of England's live synchronisation service, bridging traditional and distributed-ledger settlement, is targeted for 2028. The Digital Securities Sandbox is running with 16 firms in live issuance and settlement. Fund tokenisation rules already landed in PS26/7 on 30 April. This is no longer exploratory. It is a regulatory system starting to operate around an asset class it has decided is here to stay.

What has changed in the three weeks since

The clearest evidence that this is acceleration rather than a news cluster is what has happened since those five announcements.

Ondo is the sharpest example. Having passed $1 billion in tokenised stock value on 11 May, the platform has climbed past $3.7 billion by mid-June, with more than 260 tokenised stocks and ETFs and over $18 billion in cumulative trading volume. On 9 June it opened a public beta of Ondo Perps, leveraged equity trading on tokenised US stocks for approved non-US users, and it has hired a former Invesco ETF and Grayscale executive to build on-chain portfolio products. Demand for tokenised equity is not a forecast. It is compounding in public.

On the regulatory side, the SEC has moved from signalling intent to drafting a formal innovation exemption under Chair Paul Atkins, the mechanism that would let approved platforms list tokenised versions of listed stocks. The UK timeline has firmed up too, with the summer policy statements and the September gateway now dated rather than vague. None of this contradicts the May story. All of it extends it.

What this means for UK founders and investors

For founders thinking about tokenisation as a way to raise capital, and for investors weighing exposure to the companies building it, the practical implications fall into three areas.

First, the reference infrastructure is now established. When DTCC goes live in October, it sets a standard against which other systems will be measured. Anyone building issuance platforms, custody or secondary-market infrastructure for institutional capital has to consider how their systems interoperate with it. Ignoring it is not a credible option.

Second, regulatory timing is live. The FCA and Bank of England are consulting now, with a 3 July deadline, and the UK authorisations gateway opens in September. Firms operating in or adjacent to UK tokenised markets can still help shape the rules before they finalise. That window is narrow, and its closure will set operating conditions for years.

Third, the market is validating the thesis. The argument that tokenisation can cut the cost, time and friction of capital formation is no longer theoretical. Ondo has shown demand for tokenised equity at scale. JPMorgan has shown cross-border settlement in seconds. DTCC and NYSE have shown institutional commitment at market-infrastructure level. The plumbing being built around public-market assets will eventually have structural consequences for private-market capital formation, including how founders raise early-stage funding and how investors access it. That connection is not imminent, but the direction is clear.

The honest summary

This is not a moment to get carried away. Tokenised US Treasuries and tokenised startup equity are very different products in very different regulatory environments. The infrastructure DTCC is building serves institutional participants with existing custody relationships, not founders raising a seed round next quarter.

But the direction of infrastructure development matters, because it shapes what becomes technically and commercially possible downstream. Every settlement rail that works, every sandbox that produces a live service, every clearing house and exchange that commits to tokenised trading is a piece of plumbing being installed in a system that founders and investors will eventually use.

Five announcements, one direction. Three weeks on, still pointing the same way. Worth understanding where it leads.

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