Equity crowdfunding made a simple promise: ordinary people could back a young company early, alongside the founders, and share in what it became. Monzo is the poster child. One early round filled in 96 seconds. In December 2018 the bank raised about £20m from roughly 36,000 people. Buying in was effortless, a few taps in an app. Getting out is the part nobody designed for. Most crowd investors do not sit directly on a company's share register. They invest through a nomi

For years the frustration voiced by British founders and the people who build alongside them has been the same. You can grow a company worth billions in London and still find that nobody who helped create that value can realise any of it, short of selling to an overseas buyer or waiting out an IPO t

For more than a decade the same story has played out at the top of Europe's startup ladder. A company built in London, Paris or Stockholm reaches the stage where it needs hundreds of millions to scale, cannot find a cheque that size at home, and takes one from a United States fund instead, often shi

The money lands at the scaling stage, where British companies have long struggled to find patient equity at home.

A research note published this week by Binance Research puts a number on something the tokenisation sector has been circling for two years. It argues that crypto exchanges could route around US$2 trillion of new capital and close to 300 million new investors into global equity markets by 2031, with

Picture an angel who backed a Leeds founder's seed round eighteen months ago. The company is growing, a later investor has offered to buy some of the angel's shares, and the angel would like to take a little money off the table. There is a worry in the room. Those shares carry SEIS relief, and SEIS comes with a three year holding rule. Does selling now blow up the tax benefit? For a long time this question got waved away as too complicated, or treated as a genuine unknown

The venture capital industry runs on reputation. Relationships are currency. Warm introductions open doors that cold calls cannot. And dissent about how the system works can be career-limiting in an industry small enough for word to travel fast.

For those watching institutional asset management move onchain, the partnership announced on 12 May 2026 between Payward and Franklin Templeton carries weight that goes beyond a standard industry announcement. This is a $1.6 trillion global asset manager with a ten-year head start in tokenised finan

Only around 14% of UK angel investors are women. That figure has not shifted meaningfully in years, and it matters because the composition of the investor base directly shapes who gets funded. Female angel investors are significantly more likely to deploy capital into female-founded businesses. If t

On 6 May 2026, Chainlink, Apex Group, Bluprynt and Hacken announced the successful completion of the Bermuda Monetary Authority's Embedded Supervision Solution. The pilot demonstrated, for the first time at live scale, that regulatory compliance rules can be built directly into digital asset transac

The numbers are in for Q1 2026, and the headline story is straightforward: UK equity investment is holding steady at roughly £6 billion per quarter, the UK remains Europe's dominant destination for venture capital, and the market is, on the surface, healthy.

On 8 May 2026, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook delivered a speech at the Central Bank of West African States conference in Dakar, Senegal, that covered tokenisation in terms usually reserved for established financial market infrastructure. She confirmed that tokenised assets in the United States

The Arrangement OKX — one of the world's largest crypto exchanges by derivatives volume — has integrated BlackRock's BUIDL fund as eligible margin collateral for institutional clients. Standard Chartered acts as custodian. This is the first time a globally systemically important bank (G-SIB) has served in a custodial role in an arrangement of this kind.

Tradeweb's Q1 2026 earnings call, held on 29 April, marks a different kind of moment. The platform reported $10 million in quarterly revenue directly attributed to commercial activity on the Canton Network — the distributed ledger infrastructure purpose-built for institutional digital asset deployment. That is not a pilot. That is a revenue line. What Tradeweb Reported Tradeweb Markets, which operates one of the world's largest electronic fixed income and derivatives tr

What Morgan Stanley Has Announced. In mid-April 2026, Morgan Stanley named tokenisation of real-world assets "the next major step for upgrading financial infrastructure" and identified it as a top global business focus. The firm is targeting the second half of 2026 to launch a dedicated institutional digital wallet — a product that would allow its institutional clients to hold, transact, and receive tokenised RWAs directly within Morgan Stanley's existing wealth management i

Lise received authorisation from French regulator AMF in late 2025, becoming the first institution in Europe licensed to operate a fully tokenised equity exchange. Unlike hybrid models that tokenise existing securities while keeping legacy infrastructure in place, Lise has built a single on-chain system that combines issuance, trading, settlement, and share registry. There is no parallel paper record, no T+2 clearing cycle, no intermediary custodian between the exchange and t

What Is Being Said, and By Whom On 2 April 2026, the International Monetary Fund published a note describing tokenisation as a fundamental reconfiguration of financial architecture, not an incremental improvement to existing systems. At Davos in January, BlackRock's Larry Fink told the World Economic Forum that tokenisation is necessary and that markets need to move rapidly. In a survey published in March by Funds Europe and CACEIS, more than 60 per cent of asset managers sa

The Old Infrastructure Is Building the New One. That Is the Point. Two pieces of market structure news from the same week, neither individually dramatic, together illustrate something important about how tokenisation actually enters the financial mainstream. What Happened On 31 March 2026, DTCC launched a new business line, DTCC Digital Asset Solutions, with a mandate to tokenise assets currently held in custody by its depository arm, DTC. On the same day, Apex Group anno

The world of digital assets has seen rapid growth over the past decade, attracting a wide range of investors from retail traders to large institutions. Yet, this growth has not come without challenges. One of the most significant factors shaping investor behaviour in this space is regulatory change. As governments and regulatory bodies around the world adjust their stance on digital assets, investor adoption patterns shift accordingly. Understanding how regulatory changes inf

The British Business Bank recently announced that the British Growth Partnership Fund I has reached its first close with £200 million raised. This fund marks a significant moment as it brings pension money into UK startups, a move that has long been discussed but rarely executed at this scale. The question many are asking is whether this is a one-time effort or the start of a lasting change in how UK pension schemes invest in venture capital. Why Pension Money Matters for UK