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

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

CryptoUK is the trade association for the UK cryptoasset and digital finance sector, and its response is worth reading precisely because it stops short of applause. The vision, it agrees, is the right one. Tokenisation can cut reconciliation costs, speed up settlement and collateral movement, strengthen ownership records and open up new issuance and post trade models. The practical issue, as CryptoUK frames it, is whether any of that can be translated into the concrete things

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

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.

For years, anyone building in tokenisation in the UK has had to plan around a moving target. The rules were coming, everyone agreed, but their shape was a matter of consultation papers and educated guesses. That ended on 30 June, when the Financial Conduct Authority published the final rules and gui

On 1 July the European Union switches off the grace period that has let crypto firms operate while they queued for a licence. From that date, any business providing crypto asset services to clients in the EU without authorisation under the Markets in Crypto Assets regulation, known as MiCA, is break

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

For founders and investors. If you are a founder weighing up whether to tokenise your equity, or an investor trying to work out what you would actually be buying, this is the place to start. From a legal perspective, it covers: how tokenised equity works, what changes, what does not, and where the rules are heading. Tokenisation is a concept often met with much hype and little knowledge. At its core it is simple. A cryptoasset token is just shorthand for data held on-chai

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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