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 the past three years, tokenised finance has had a structural problem: the infrastructure for digital assets and the infrastructure for traditional securities have lived in separate systems, requiring separate workflows, separate reconciliation, and separate governance. Broadridge, the post-trade

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

Litigation finance has long been one of the more opaque corners of alternative assets. Returns are uncorrelated, the underlying exposure is contractual rather than market-driven, and access has historically been restricted to a small number of specialist funds and institutional allocators. A new iss

Jamie Marshall at CMS makes the case that tokenised funds are a historic opportunity for Scotland and the UK. The argument deserves a wider hearing, and the timing is tighter than most realise.

The UK government confirmed today that a Financial Services Bill will form part of the 2026 to 2027 parliamentary programme, following the King's Speech delivered this morning. The bill has been anticipated for months. It will fold the Payment Systems Regulator into the Financial Conduct Authority,

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

Liquidity Map. Did The Liquidity Problem in Tokenised Finance Just Get Solved?

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.

How the RWA Market Crossed $29 Billion and Why the Real Growth Is Still to Come Three years ago, tokenised real-world assets were a niche within a niche — a small group of experiments by crypto-native firms testing whether traditional financial instruments could be represented on public blockchains. Today, the market has grown nearly 20x to exceed $29 billion in on-chain value, institutional players ranging from BlackRock to JPMorgan are deploying live products, and at least

HM Treasury unveiled a comprehensive payment services regulatory integration plan on 21 April 2026 — during UK Fintech Week — designed to bring stablecoins, tokenised bank deposits, and conventional electronic payments under one coherent legal roof. The package proposes new legislation to reduce administrative burdens for firms seeking to provide stablecoin payment services, whilst expanding the FCA's regulatory powers over Open Banking developments.

Plume employees can now elect to receive a portion of their monthly salary in shares of WisdomTree's WTGXX, a tokenised, SEC-regulated money market fund that currently yields around 4–5% annually.

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

Real-world asset tokenisation has moved well beyond the proof-of-concept stage. With over $27 billion in tokenised value on-chain and the world's largest financial institutions deploying real capital, 2026 is the year the market stopped asking whether this works and started asking how fast it scales.

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 most consistent objection from traditional banks to adopting stablecoin infrastructure has been this: "We don't want to hold crypto." On April 8, 2026, Circle answered that objection directly. Circle Payments Network (CPN) Managed Payments is a full-stack stablecoin settlement platform that allows banks, payment service providers (PSPs), and fintechs to settle transactions in USDC — without ever holding or managing digital assets themselves. Circle handles the entire d

Lloyds, Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Nationwide, Santander, and Monzo are all involved in building tokenised banking infrastructure. This is not a crypto experiment. It is the financial system founders already use, being upgraded from the inside. When most founders hear the word tokenisation, they think of raising money. A token that represents shares in their company, issued through a regulated platform, distributed to investors. That is one part of the tokenisation story, and i

UK Investors Left Out as Fundrise and Kraken Launch Onchain VCX Fund for Global Access. The tokenisation of venture capital funds is reshaping how investors access private markets. Recently, Fundrise and Kraken’s xStocks platform introduced an onchain version of the Fundrise Innovation Fund (NYSE: VCX), enabling global investors to trade a token representing shares in this venture capital vehicle. This development marks a significant milestone in the integration of traditiona