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Are institutional investors looking for a higher level of regulatory certainty before they invest in digital assets? Institutional investors care primarily about their investments, the speed with which they can be executed, the transparency of information about them and how safely they are kept. So, for them, a sound regulatory environment is a requirement that must be met before they will invest. Are institutional investors looking for a higher level of regulatory certainty

Are tokenisers focusing on privately managed assets because they are the easy option? This was not the view of the audience. Only minorities thought that tokenising privately managed assets is an easier option than attacking the public markets, and hardly anybody thought issuers are more readily found there. Broader distribution of privately managed asset classes, making privately managed assets more tradeable, and building an infrastructure to support them, are the prioritie

Are traditional exchanges doing nothing about tokenisation? Anecdotal evidence suggests all major exchanges have large teams exploring digital assets, some of which have moved beyond Proofs of Concept (PoCs) and pilot tests and are now close to launching products, but little of their work has seeped into the public domain. This is less because of intellectual property considerations, or lack of buy-in by senior management, than the fact exchanges tend to be regulated and ofte

A Future of Finance interview with Milo Guastamacchia, Founder and CEO or Yooro. Technology-driven securitisation platform Yooro aims to...

Are specialist intermediaries such as market-makers necessary to generate liquidity in tokenised asset markets? Traditional markets prove that liquidity does not arise naturally from the interaction of issuers and investors, and cannot be sustained by their activities either, but must instead be created by market-makers and sell- and buy-side firms using collateralised credit and asset borrowings to take positions and increase the value of their trades (see Chart 1). So liqui

A Future of Finance interview with Richard Brown, Chief Technology and Product Officer at R3. R3 celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. Richard G. Brown, R3’s Chief Technology and Product Officer, speaks to Bob Currie about the drivers for Corda’s design, how these are changing, and how far the company has fulfilled the targets that it envisaged at formation. The discussion explores the potential for convergence of private and public blockchain ecosystems, thereby pot

Blockchain-based cross-border payments technology company Ripple has bought prime broker Hidden Road for US$1.25 billion The Ripple Stablecoin RLUSD will facilitate cross-margining between digital assets and traditional markets for Hidden Road customers Hidden Road will migrate its post-trade activity to the XRP Ledger (XRPL), the Ripple blockchain Ripple, the technology company that uses blockchain to speed up and lower the cost of cross-border payments, has acquired non-ban

A Future of Finance interview with Ciarán McGonagle, Chief Legal & Product Officer at Tokenovate. Tokenovate delivers post-trade...

Date: March 13, 2025 Venue: Reed Smith Offices at 1 Blossom Street, London E1 6RS 1-Day Event: 8.30 am to 8.00 pm Audience: Traditional Exchanges; Digital Exchanges; CCPs; CSDs; Issuers (non-financial and financial); Asset Managers; Wealth Managers; Banks and Broker/Dealers; Technology Companies; Regulators and Public Policy Makers Topics Are tokenisers making a mistake in choosing to ignore the conventional public equity markets? Are tokenisers currently focused on alternat

Digital asset custody: What can possibly go wrong?

How do the risks of digital asset custody differ from the risks of traditional custody? Digital assets are not the same as conventional financial assets, so custodians must master familiar risks in unfamiliar guises, and entirely new risks. The fact that ownership of a digital asset depends on possession of private keys is an obvious difference from registered securities or funds. The keys are routinely sharded into multiple parts which must not only be reassembled as needed

How is the digital asset custody industry evolving? The origins of digital asset custody lie in the initial cryptocurrency boom of 2015-2017. Retail investors needed digital wallets to hold the private keys to their coins, and the cryptocurrency exchanges provided them. Independent digital asset custodians, and vendors of independent digital asset custody technologies, proliferated in 2017 and especially 2018, as the first cryptocurrency bubble inflated and then deflated. At

Custodians have been obliged since 2019 to check that holders of cryptocurrencies and Stablecoins are not money launderers, terrorists or sanctions evaders. (1) What impact have those obligations had on the day-to-day practice of digital asset custodians? Both traditional custodian banks and specialist digital asset custodians have recognised the need to comply with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) obligations to run Anti Money Laundering (AML), Countering the Financi

Why do digital asset custodians exist at all when blockchain was invented to eliminate the need for trusted intermediaries? Issuers and investors, and intermediaries such as asset managers and brokers, are agreed that custodians are essential to secure mainstream adoption of digital assets. Such universal agreement reflects the fact that custodians reassure investors, asset managers and brokers that their assets are safe, and their privacy and confidentiality will be respecte

​* R3’s Corda dominates the tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market, with over $10 billion in on-chain assets – setting the standard for industry adoption * Trusted by the world’s leading banks, Corda represents the largest ecosystem of live RWA networks, processing over 1 million transactions each day * Client momentum across R3’s digital products suite, supported by regulatory and industry tailwinds, is driving the highest number of live applications in production globally

What is the event about? This virtual round table is a Thought Leadership discussion focused on how to solve the biggest single obstacle to progress in the tokenisation of securities and funds: the lack of liquidity. Liquidity is touted routinely as a benefit of tokenising securities and funds. But liquidity is not just a consequence of tokenisation at scale. It is also a cause of large and active markets in security and fund tokens. So what is this cause-and-effect thing tha

A Future of Finance interview with Sanjeev Birari, Co-Founder and CBO of Zoniqx. Zoniqx, the California based pioneer of tokenisation...

What are the incentives for private debt and equity issuers to tokenise their offerings? Securities token offerings (STOs) are suited to companies that are too big for crowd-funding platforms and too small for the conventional capital markets. So it is not surprising that the audience thought private debt and equity issuers are not just the obvious beneficiaries of tokenisation (Chart 1) but the issuers with the greatest appetite to tokenise securities (Chart 2) and the issue

USDC Stablecoin issuer Circle has acquired the USYC tokenised money market fund issued by Hashnote Circle will integrate the USYC tokenised money market fund with its USDC Stablecoin The integration will enable cryptocurrency traders to switch easily on-chain between tokenised cash and tokenised interest-bearing collateral USDC issuer Circle has acquired Hashnote, the issuer of the US Yield Coin (USYC) tokenised money market fund, which currently has US$1.52 billion in asse

Circle, issuer of the USDC Stablecoin, says it will support the use of USDC by participants of the Canton Network blockchain The recent acquisition by Circle of the USYC tokenised money market fund means Canton Network users can use USDC in tandem with USYC The USDC-USYC combination will appeal to cryptocurrency firms looking to trade tokenised securities and funds as well as cryptocurrencies Circle says its USDC Stablecoin will be available on Canton Network. It means USDC c