For most of the last decade, digital assets and institutional finance sat in different rooms. One talked about disruption and the death of intermediaries. The other talked about fiduciary duty and operational risk. A new whitepaper from Arcesium, the financial technology firm spun out of the hedge f

A checkout button is not usually the stuff of strategy memos. This one is worth a pause.

The backers include HSBC, BNP Paribas and Citadel Securities, a sign that the institutions which run capital markets now want to own the rails underneath them.

Standard Chartered's new call is not simply that tokenisation grows. It is that tokenised assets become the fuel decentralised finance runs on.

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 or

When the company that safekeeps more than 22 trillion euros of the world's securities decides tokenisation is the future, the interesting part is not the press release. It is the architecture underneath it.

The technology mostly works now. The harder problem is that most people still do not trust or understand it, and that gap is where adoption stalls.

On the same day that two giants of market infrastructure moved deeper into digital assets, a Spanish wholesale custodian quietly switched on crypto custody for other banks. On its own it is a modest announcement. As part of a pattern, it is the story.

The headlines in tokenisation tend to reward the issuers and the funds. The quieter, more telling story usually sits in the custody layer, the unglamorous business of holding assets safely and keeping the share register straight.

Picture a founder building a credible, growing company somewhere outside the M25, with real revenue and no warm introduction to a single London fund. The product works. The numbers stand up. What is missing is not ambition or quality. It is access: to the right investors, on reasonable terms, withou

For most of its short history, tokenisation has had a quiet structural problem. Every platform that issues a tokenised bond, fund or slice of private equity has tended to build its own rules for how that token behaves: how a transfer is checked against a whitelist, how an asset is frozen when a cour

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 institutional custody race in digital assets has a significant new entrant. Laser Digital, the digital asset subsidiary of Japanese banking group Nomura, has received conditional approval from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish Laser Digital National Trust Bank, a de n

A quiet signal is worth paying attention to. Two independent reports have recently set out to rank and compare the tokenisation platforms now operating across Europe and beyond. One, published by the Austrian firm Onino, focuses specifically on white-label tokenisation platforms operating within the

The tokenised equity sector has reached a milestone that illustrates just how quickly institutional appetite for on-chain financial instruments has matured. Ondo Global Markets, the tokenised stock and ETF platform operated by Ondo Finance, has surpassed $1.5 billion in total value locked, less than

For the tokenised economy to function at scale, money needs to move as efficiently as the assets it is settling. That is the straightforward logic behind a new partnership announced this week between Orbital, a global payment orchestration platform, and Banking Circle, a Luxembourg-domiciled credit

For years, one question has shadowed the ambitions of every institution considering tokenised securities on a public blockchain: what happens to our positions, our counterparty details, our transaction history? If any node on the network can read the data, the case for moving regulated assets onchai

The tokenisation industry has spent several years building infrastructure while asking when it will produce the kind of financial returns that attract mainstream capital markets attention. Securitize, the largest regulated tokenisation platform in the United States, just answered part of that questi

When standards bodies form in emerging financial markets, the names on the founding membership list matter enormously. They shape the requirements, the definitions and ultimately the infrastructure that gets built. The Tokenized Cash Management Advisory Group, known as TCMAG, is the closest thing th

For a sector that has spent years justifying its infrastructure ambitions to sceptical capital markets, Securitize's announcement this week that it will list on Nasdaq at a $1.25 billion valuation is more than a corporate milestone. It is the first time a company built entirely around tokenised secu