The tokenisation of money, securities and funds has reached the point at which it must progress or retreat. Stablecoins, the one tokenised asset to have grown significantly in the last two years, have stalled and activity is declining. They face obvious physical constraints on their growth anyway. The superior alternative - tokenised deposits - remain intra-bank. Central bankers continue to work on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) – notably in Europe – but without conviction.
In July 2026, the market value of distributed digital assets (essentially, native digital assets) was just US$34 billion and the market value of referenced digital assets (essentially, non-native digital assets) US$384 billion. [1] These sums amount to maybe 0.15 per cent of the combined value of the traditional debt and equity capital markets alone. Even blockchain technology seems to be in abeyance, with talent, money and attention flowing instead into artificial intelligence (AI).
Legitimate questions are being asked, insistently. Where is the scale? When will scale come? What is holding scale up? The answer is that there are many signs that the current era is not a dead-end but the end of the beginning of the transformation of the capital markets.
In the United States, the incumbent stock exchanges and central securities depository (CSD) are choosing tokenisation to defend what they have. In Europe, the European Central Bank (ECB) continues to work methodically towards making it possible to settle tokenised transactions in central bank money – including, one day, with a digital euro. The Bank of England is turning atomic settlement into a feature of the next iteration of its Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system, the service that delivers settlement in central bank money. Euro Stablecoins are being planned. Regulation, an obstacle to progress of longstanding, is in most developed jurisdictions increasingly aligned with market realities.
ValueExchange’s 2026 DLT in the Real-World Survey, now in its seventh year, finds 510 firms and market infrastructures in the capital markets using blockchain to tokenise money, funds and securities and settle and safekeep tokenised assets. Above all, the Bank for International Settlements-led Project Agora is quietly plotting the overthrow of the entire prevailing infrastructural dispensation of the money and capital markets of the world.
Revolutions gestate long and are not accomplished by a single act. Across the money and capital markets, countless small acts and investments are compounding. A unified, blockchain-based issuance, trading, settlement and custody platform capable of replacing the asset class silos of today, is moving steadily from theory to practice. Technologies are converging too. The tokenised assets that are issued, exchanged, settled and serviced on blockchains will be driven and supervised by AI. The digital revolution in capital markets is not dead or sleeping. It is at work.
[1] https://app.rwa.xyz/
