Explore the rise of Digital Assets in asset management. Learn how Digital Assets can revolutionize costs and trust in the industry today.

Are digital asset exchanges offering peer-to-peer trading? The cryptocurrency markets have proved that peer-to-peer trading is technologically possible. This is not surprising. The original vision of blockchain technology was to replace trust in centralised intermediaries with trust in decentralised technology. The collapse of the centralised FTX exchange reinforced, rather than undermined, the validity of that claim. Which places centralised digital asset exchanges hosting t

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

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

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

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

Discover how tokenisation is revolutionising asset management. Learn how tokenisation helps distribute products to new investors effectively.

What tokenisation will enable the financial markets to deliver tomorrow which they cannot provide today

Why the benefits of tokenisation depend on the issuance of “native” rather than “asset-backed” (or "digital twin”) digital assets

How a common platform or unified ledger could unleash network effects in the token markets

Does tokenisation have a scaling problem today and, if so, why?  Some token platforms are growing. But tokenisation as a whole is struggling to scale. This is largely because the business case for adoption is not yet clear. However, the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) bubble of 2017, the cryptocurrency crisis of 2022 and the Proofs of Concept and Pilot Tests of the early explorations of blockchain by regulated institutions were important staging posts and are in the past. The ind

What are the costs of lack of digital money on chain? The absence of on-chain money to settle the cash leg of transactions on blockchains and pay entitlements has many negative effects on the security and fund token markets. Ultimately, every tokenisation use-case depends on the availability of on-chain cash to realise its potential value to users. After all, a large part of the appeal of blockchain is its ability to capture transactions, settlements and transaction records o

Are vested interests at work? Regulated financial institutions have adopted a cautious approach to tokenisation. But the main reason is not protection of existing revenue streams. It is a concern that the existing structure of the capital markets reflects the lessons of experience, and that it would be foolish to jettison that knowledge and the safeguards it erected in pursuit of the cost savings afforded by disintermediation. That said, there are cases where incumbents resis

Just four countries have issued a central bank digital currency (CBDC). But the CBDC Tracker suggests that interest in CBDCs is far from moribund. In September 2024 26 central banks had a CBDC at the pilot stage and another 30 at the proof-of-concept stage. A further 103 are researching the idea. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) website lists 20 CBDC research projects in which central banks have taken part since 2016. Just seven central banks have cancelled their