The world's most important settlement infrastructure is going digital. On 4 May 2026, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation confirmed it will begin limited production trades of tokenised securities in July 2026, with a full commercial launch planned for October. The announcement confirms wha

For UK founders and investors watching the tokenisation of equity markets, one of the clearest signals yet that this space is being given a real regulatory foundation arrived from Washington on 18 May 2026. Bloomberg Law reported that the US Securities and Exchange Commission, under Chair Paul Atkin

On 14 May 2026, the United States Senate Banking Committee passed the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act in a 15-9 vote. Two Democrats joined Republicans to advance the bill, marking the first bipartisan approval of comprehensive US digital asset regulation at committee level. The vote moves the legis

Today the US Senate Banking Committee sits down to vote on the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act, a 309-page piece of legislation that would do something Washington has been promising for years: draw a clear line between which digital assets are securities and which are commodities, and assign regula

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

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 US administration has attached a specific deadline to its push for digital asset market structure legislation. Patrick Witt, executive director of the President's Council of Advisers for Digital Assets, stated on 6 May 2026 that the White House is targeting July 4 for Senate passage of the Digit

What ESMA Said ESMA's April 2026 statement sets out the authority's expectations in direct terms. Any entity providing crypto-asset services to EU clients after 1 July 2026 without a MiCA authorisation will be in breach of EU law and must stop providing those services. The statement covers the full scope of regulated activity under MiCA: issuance of crypto-assets including asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens, and the provision of crypto-asset services including custod

For founders and institutional investors watching the tokenised securities space, 4 May marked a quiet but structurally important inflection point. Securitize, the world's leading tokenisation platform by assets under administration, received approvals from FINRA that expand the capabilities of its broker-dealer subsidiary, Securitize Markets LLC, in ways that have not existed in the US financial system before.

DigiShares in the Gulf DigiShares, the Danish-founded tokenisation infrastructure provider, has announced that CEO Claus Skaaning, will participate in an RWA tokenisation masterclass in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday 6 May 2026 where the programme will cover three core topics: legal readiness for RWA tokenisation in the Gulf, asset classification under emerging Saudi frameworks, and the near-term market direction for institutional digital assets in the region.

As of this week, the global tokenisation industry has convened in Dubai. Dubai RWA Week 2026 — running from April 27 to May 1 with the flagship RWA Summit on May 1 at Uptown Tower in DMCC — marks the most significant gathering of institutional RWA participants outside of New York and London this year. For UK founders and investors tracking where capital and regulatory momentum are building, the event sends a clear signal: the Gulf has become a first-tier jurisdiction for r

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.

The informal deadline for the US Senate Banking Committee to schedule a markup of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — the CLARITY Act — came and went on Friday 25 April without any action from Committee Chairman Tim Scott. The bill, which passed the House 294 to 134 last July, now faces an extended wait before it can move toward a Senate floor vote.

Time is almost up for European crypto-asset businesses operating under MiCA's transitional grace period. On 17 April 2026, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) issued a formal statement — document reference ESMA75-113276571-1679 — making clear that the transitional periods under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation will definitively end on 1 July 2026. There will be no further extensions.

On 21 April 2026, Atkins told an industry audience that the SEC was "on the cusp" of releasing a framework that would allow tokenised securities to trade directly on blockchain networks for the first time under formal regulatory cover. For an industry that has operated in legal grey areas for years, that statement represents a significant shift in the regulatory weather.

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

Is Tokenisation Safe, Legal, and Can Anyone Get Ripped Off? Founders Are Asking. The Answers Are More Complicated Than the Platforms Let On.

Digital Plumbing evolving The debate about whether tokenisation works has largely been settled. The harder question, the one that will define the next two years, is whether the financial system's underlying infrastructure can support a transition from carefully managed pilots to genuine production scale. From Proof of Concept to Production Problem 2025 was, by most measures, the year institutional tokenisation stopped being theoretical. The EU's MiCA framework became operat

On 2 April 2026, the International Monetary Fund published a formal note arguing that tokenisation is not an incremental improvement to financial infrastructure but a fundamental change in how trust, settlement, and risk management operate across the global system. That is worth pausing on. What the IMF Actually Said The note, entitled Tokenized Finance, was authored by Tobias Adrian, the IMF's Financial Counsellor and Director of its Monetary and Capital Markets Depar

US Congress Decided Tokenisation Is Inevitable - Now Comes the Hard Part.