The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation began limited production trades of tokenised Russell 1000 stocks, exchange traded funds and US Treasuries this week, moving the world's largest securities depository from pilot planning into live settlement on blockchain rails for the first time.

South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix raised $26.5bn in an oversubscribed American depositary receipt sale that began trading on Nasdaq on Friday, and within the same trading window tokenised versions of its stock were already live across three separate blockchain networks. Ondo Finance issued the tokenis

For founders and investors in the UK watching how tokenised equity infrastructure matures elsewhere, a partnership announced on 8 July between two US tokenisation specialists offers a useful signal. The biggest obstacle to broker dealer adoption has rarely been the technology. It has been the regula

Barclays published a report with PwC on 9 July putting a number on something the UK tokenisation sector has mostly argued from instinct rather than evidence: what the technology is actually worth to the country. The answer, according to "Rewiring Finance: Tokenisation as a Catalyst for UK Growth", is up to £33bn in additional GDP per year by 2035, with roughly two thirds of that benefit landing outside financial services altogether. Just think about that, Most tokenisation c

After spending Tuesday at the London Blockchain Institutional Tokenisation Summit, hosted at DLA Piper, I came away with a different feeling from the one the report leaves you with. Not a contradiction of it, but a serious counterweight. In a room full of asset managers, custodians, market makers, platforms and lawyers, the mood was neither hype nor anxiety. It was practical, curious, and quietly confident. The prevailing view was that the UK's regulatory environment, and the

For anyone in the UK still weighing whether tokenised equity is a real market or a slide in a pitch deck, the past week offered a concrete answer. On 2 July, Securitize began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SECZ, and on the same day it made its own newly listed shares availab

For anyone building in tokenisation in Britain, the hard question has never been whether the technology works. It is whether the UK will be a place worth building it in. A new report from UK Finance, the industry body for the country's banking and finance sector, offers an uncomfortable but useful a

The most important word in the tokenisation story this week was not price or listing. It was voting. On 2 July, Ondo Finance and Broadridge Financial Solutions launched what they describe as the first live third party tokenised US securities operating fully within the existing regulatory perimeter,

The most important developments in tokenisation are rarely the loud ones. They tend to happen in the settlement layer, the part of finance almost nobody outside the back office ever thinks about, and they decide whether an idea that works in a pilot can survive contact with real institutional money.

Settlement is the least glamorous word in finance and quite possibly the most important. It is the moment a trade actually completes, when cash and asset change hands and the deal becomes real. For decades that moment has taken days, propped up by a chain of intermediaries each taking a cut and addi

There is a neat circularity to the week ahead in New York. Securitize, the firm that turns funds run by BlackRock, Apollo and VanEck into blockchain tokens, is itself about to become a publicly traded share. On 29 June its merger partner holds the shareholder vote. If it passes, as expected, the com

On 30 June, something quietly ends for anyone who owns shares in a private British company. Until that date, trading those shares on the London Stock Exchange's Private Securities Market, the venue built under the UK's new PISCES regime, costs nothing in transaction fees. From 1 July, the first real

From 1 July, the largest crypto exchange in the world stops serving customers across the European Union. Binance has emailed users in Poland, Italy, Spain, France and elsewhere to say it can no longer accept new registrations and will restrict services for EU residents, after failing to secure a lic

A new mid year audit from the crypto research house 21Shares, published on 24 June, contains one figure that anyone watching tokenisation in the UK should sit with. The total value of tokenised real world assets depends almost entirely on which rails you count. On public blockchains, the kind anyone

The rails now reaching mainstream wallets are the same rails private and startup equity will eventually run on.

A dental technology company has put its shares on Solana through a Regulation S offering, and the UK adviser on the deal hints at where private capital formation is heading.

The first big test of tokenised equity exposed the gap between onchain demand and the real shares behind it.

Most of the experiments did not survive in their first form. The problem they were probing is still the most important one in early stage capital.

The everything exchange now puts a public price on private companies before they list. For founders, the catch sits in what these contracts do not carry.

A view from the author on where this is heading, and why the noise about crypto misses the point entirely.