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

Picture a founder outside the story everyone is telling. She is not building a large language model. She is building a climate hardware business in Sheffield, or a healthtech tool in Cardiff, with early revenue and a plan to grow. This week the British Business Bank published the numbers that descri

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

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

The Bank of England, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority asked the market a very large question in May, and the window to answer it closes on 3 July. Their joint Call for Input, titled The Future of Tokenisation, sets out a shared vision for how tokenised assets s

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.

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

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.

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.

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

London Tech Week in review. Instead, in line with the current mood in Number 10, much of the headline address was given over to a lecture and a warning. Tech firms were told they had three months to prevent children accessing, creating and sharing harmful material or face new legislation, with the Prime Minister telling the room that the pace of change cannot be an excuse for harm and that nobody is getting a free pass. Protecting children online is an entirely legitimate pr

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.

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

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

A founder building a women's health product, a food system fix or a financial inclusion tool in the UK today is working on exactly the problems the country says it wants solved. New data suggests they are also among the hardest founders in the market to fund, and the reason is not returns. It is inf