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.

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

Picture a founder in Leeds with a working product, paying customers and a credible plan to grow. She has no warm introduction to a fund, no prior raise on her record, and no one in her immediate network who has done this before. New UK data suggests her single biggest disadvantage is not her idea, h

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 first Ways and Means crypto tax hearing in years. For UK founders and funds watching the global contest for capital, the signal matters more than the detail.

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.

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

On 1 July 2026, four weeks from today, the transitional period under the EU's Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation expires across the bloc. From that date, any firm providing cryptoasset services to EU clients without full MiCA authorisation will be in breach of EU law and must stop. For UK tokenisat

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

When London Tech Week opens its doors at Olympia on 8 June, a founder sitting in the audience of the new Founders Stage will hear a question asked out loud that, until recently, was mostly muttered in private. Do I really need to raise? For a decade the assumption ran one way. You built something, y

On 1 July 2026, the EU's transitional window for crypto-asset service providers closes. With one month remaining, the headlines have focused on platforms scrambling for licences and stablecoins being delisted. If you are a founder exploring equity tokenisation, or an investor who has backed a company doing so, you may have read those pieces and wondered whether any of it is actually about you. The answer depends on where you sit. If You Are a Founder The most useful thing

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

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 anyone watching the tokenisation industry and asking when the commercial reality catches up with the institutional enthusiasm, Securitize's first quarter 2026 results published on 20 May provide the clearest signal yet. The company posted record revenue of $19.5 million for Q1 2026, up 39% year