On the journey to the future, are traditional stock exchanges roadmaps, roadblocks or roadkill?

Digital Asset Exchanges 2026 Recap

On 12 March 2026, Future of Finance hosted its second Digital Asset Exchanges 2026, bringing together industry leaders to examine whether digital asset markets are transforming capital markets or simply re-engineering traditional exchange models through new technology, with a particular focus on liquidity, regulation, post-trade infrastructure, and the real-world scalability of tokenisation across asset classes.

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The Event in Numbers

5

Sessions

26

Speakers

120+

Registered Delagates

85+

Represented Companies

Key Takeaways

Keynote

1. Vertically integrated cryptocurrency exchanges, unlike cryptocurrency futures exchanges, can launch products and services quickly because they are not dependent on brokers and clearing brokers to support them. 2. Regulated digital asset exchanges pursuing institutional investment in tokenised assets have found that they too must integrate vertically, providing primary and secondary markets, brokerage, custody, settlement and depository services. 3. As first movers in digital asset markets, hedge funds are looking for vertically integrated exchanges to reduce liquidity fragmentation by offering execution, margining, settlement, custody and staking on a single platform. 4. An alternative to vertically integrated digital asset exchanges is prime brokerage, in which a single counterparty overcomes fragmentation of execution, collateral and credit, settlement and custody, and offers netting and cross-margining. 5. Most regulated digital asset exchanges now provide cryptocurrency services partly out of necessity (to pay gas fees for settlement on blockchains) and partly for pragmatic reasons (to generate income while other revenues scale). 6. Traditional exchanges will be overtaken by both decentralised exchanges (DEXes) and hybrid cryptocurrency-tokenised asset exchanges if they do not replace legacy technology by purchasing battle-tested blockchain platforms. 7. Regulation remains a constraint on the modernisation of post-trade services, because it continues to prescribe roles for intermediaries, but also because it insists regulated intermediaries get additional licences to handle digital assets. 8. Law remains a constraint on the growth of tokenised assets not just because it has failed to eliminate uncertainty over issues such as ownership of on-chain assets, but because regulations are poorly aligned with and fail to exploit legal changes. 9. Convergence of cryptocurrency, regulated digital asset and traditional exchanges is widely anticipated but scaling small exchanges is hard in terms of compliance (especially data flows in vertically integrated exchanges) and operational capacity. 10. Digital twin tokenisations such as money market funds are a low-risk way for exchanges to secure business by minimising effort for issuers but are also useful as collateral in on-chain trading by professional cryptocurrency traders. 11. To scale, digital asset exchanges do not need to incur the compliance and operational costs of obtaining direct access to retail investors, because they can work with banks that want to offer digital assets to their retail customers.

What are digital asset exchanges doing differently?

1. Traditional exchanges were right to approach digital assets cautiously at first, because some were high risk, they are the incumbents, and the regulation that enables them to remain compliant and fulfil their fiduciary duty was absent. 2. Trading on-exchange is efficient, so traditional exchanges must identify areas where they can make capital-raising and trading less inefficient, such as funds invested in privately managed assets, including private equity and credit. 3. Traditional exchanges can move at the pace of their traditional clients only, introducing digital assets in ways that do not require existing customers to invest in new technology platforms without a convincing commercial rationale. 4. However, traditional exchange technology platforms cannot support tokenisation, trading 24/7 and fractionalisation, so they must adapt while retaining the benefits of regulated status, operational resilience and public trust. 5. The risk exchanges incur if they proceed too cautiously is missing the Tesla or Chat GPT moment, when years of minimal progress suddenly give way to exponential growth in tokenised assets, and they are overtaken to the point of obsolescence. 6. Tokenisation will erode current sources of revenue for exchanges, such as listing and trading fees, data sales and post-trade services, which they can offset by tokenising assets, listing tokens and distributing tokens to retail investors. 7. Data vending is not certain to decay as a revenue stream, because tokenisation could increase the volume of data generated by trading in asset classes that were previously managed privately, such as private equity and credit. 8. Traditional exchanges do not need to service retail investors directly but must adapt or risk losing their wholesale clients to new entrants because the clients of their clients are demanding digital asset services already. 9. Tokenisation opens the possibility of hyper-personalised investment, by reducing the components of securities to flows of tokens that can broaden the range of asset classes available and accommodate even trivial investment sizes. 10. Both established and new exchanges must accept that they cannot own the markets in digital assets, and must therefore support technical interoperability and data standards, to avoid the fragmentation of liquidity between siloed pools. 11. With most traditional exchanges building platforms to compete with new entrants to tokenise securities and funds, and digital cash becoming available on-chain in the form of Stablecoins, exchanges are now locked in a contest to attract liquidity.

Are traditional stock exchanges making it or faking it in digital assets?

1. The SEC decision to allow the DTCC to tokenise equities, ETFs and US Treasuries will galvanise tokenisation if its service is interoperable across blockchains and borders, use cases are identified and liquidity develops. 2. One use case being touted is collateral mobility, in which banks could continue to trade a security in its traditional form, but use the tokenised form of the same security as collateral in, say, a repo transaction. 3. Tokenisation is part of a defensive strategy by DTCC, dating back to the acquisition of Securrency in 2023, that protects the existing depository business from the tokenised equity and ETF trading offered by Robinhood. 4. Interoperability across national borders will not be a priority for the DTCC because, if its tokenisation model is successful, issuers will be attracted by a lower cost of capital to the financial markets of the United States. 5. CSDs everywhere have a significant competitive advantage as markets tokenise, because they hold all existing securities on their books, and are not reliant on attracting either native or non-native new issues. 6. Technology cannot replace all CSD functions, which include safeguarding the integrity of issues, settlement finality, enforceable property rights, protecting investors in bankruptcies and enabling illicit transactions to be reversed. 7. Although blockchains can in theory replace the settlement function of a CSD by exchanging cash and securities tokens on-chain by smart contract, they must in practice either comply with CSDR or secure an exemption from it. 8. The DTCC has issued a challenge to CSDs everywhere to invest in tokenisation, but only a handful of exchange-owned CSDs have risen to it, while most CSDs remain reluctant to ask users to invest in anything but regulatory compliance. 9. Incumbent CSDs are formidable competitors for blockchain-based challengers but start-up token exchanges and other infrastructures are securing regulatory licences, so CSDs cannot afford to be complacent. 10. As Saudi Arabia found when it opened to foreign capital, institutional money abhors atomic settlement because it requires expensive pre-funding and imposes enormous liquidity costs by dispensing with pre-settlement netting. 11. Integration of trade and post-trade functions is convenient for retail investors trading cryptocurrencies but does not suit institutional firms that need multimarket access, credit and reduced counterparty risks.

Is post-trade infrastructure, not exchanges, the kingmaker in digital asset markets?

1. A comparison of how six jurisdictions (EU, Hong Kong, Singapore, UAE, UK and US) regulate digital asset exchanges divides them between high rigour and slow process, high rigour and rapid process and low rigour and rapid process. 2. Competition between jurisdictions is illusory because lax and strict jurisdictions attract different sorts of business and, without convergence in regulation, the interoperability that drives global competition and scale cannot develop. 3. Institutional money and service providers favour regulatory caution, clarity and conservatism, adhering to the “same activity, same risk, same regulation” mantra but valuing enough flexibility to accommodate the peculiar risks of digital assets. 4. Regulators that argue high standards confer a competitive advantage ignore the corollary that making regulated status expensive to acquire and retain also erects a barrier to entry that protects incumbents from innovative challengers. 5. Challengers face double jeopardy because regulators that introduce specific regulations for digital assets tend to create confusion while regulators that extend existing regulations to digital assets advantage incumbents that comply already. 6. Regulators that focus on using regulation to minimise risk to investors and their own reputation for competence discourage competition and innovation but the negative effects can be offset by a mandate to encourage competition. 7. European regulators have mistaken certainty and status for encouragement and innovation, and competed to attract business to their jurisdiction, rather than foster scale and competition between firms by making markets interoperable. 8. Digital assets have yet to experience a galvanising regulatory response akin to Reg NMS (2005) and MiFID 1 (2007), which increased competition, trimmed trading fees, improved transparency, accelerated settlement and cut execution costs. 9. The number of digital asset exchanges that can satisfy the on-boarding criteria of a regulated financial institution such as a bank is small, in large part because regulated financial institutions have not adapted their risk criteria to digital assets. 10. Those blockchain-based platforms that operate offshore because they can never secure a respectable regulatory licence could instead be regulated by the bodies that supervise betting shops, casinos, gaming machines and lotteries. 11. Many cryptocurrency firms find they cannot open a bank account, yet institutions that want to specialise in offering cryptocurrency firms banking services find they too face high regulatory hurdles and service restrictions to obtain a licence.

Is regulation an enabler of or an obstacle to the growth of digital asset markets?

1. The success of non-native spot Bitcoin ETFs traded on multiple exchanges on behalf of institutional investors would be greater if issuers followed the broader ETF example of supporting them with an efficient post-trade infrastructure. 2. ETFs could accelerate the adoption of tokenisation in the corporate bond markets more effectively that direct tokenisation of debt instruments, because ETFs are efficient vehicles for assuming and transferring risk, and this generates liquidity. 3. Established asset managers resist the tokenisation of mutual funds as liable to reduce their revenue and margin, obliging innovators to focus on listing alternative and private funds, where tokenisation can add liquidity as well as efficiency. 4. Tokenised real estate funds have yet to demonstrate superiority to REITs, but the tokenisation of individual buildings is making real estate available as collateral, with heavy haircuts, in jurisdictions where ownership rights are enforceable. 5. Making conventional assets useable as collateral is driving tokenisation of public equities, because borrowing against a token provably backed one-to-one by an asset in custody is easier than borrowing against the same asset directly. 6. In the EU, correcting the absence of a pan-European bond market for SMEs has become a public policy priority, with the European Commission funding the DEUSS bond platform on the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI). 7. Expectations that a single public or private blockchain infrastructure or common or single programmable ledger will achieve interoperability by design downplays the risks that innovation will be suppressed and asset class flexibility will be lost. 8. Building an infrastructure that can support tokenised securities and funds at scale necessitates industry-wide collaboration on interoperability to counter the fragmentation caused by the multiplication of blockchain protocols. 9. Establishing formal structures where issuers, investors, intermediaries and infrastructures can meet regularly to collaborate on non-competitive initiatives such as interoperability is a useful idea that could help digital assets to flourish. 10. Collaboration between exchanges, CSDs, payments market infrastructures, sell-side intermediaries and buy-side firms is not a pipedream, because projects such as moving to a T+1 settlement timetable could not happen without it. 11. Digital assets present capital markets with the opportunity to offer issuers and investors access to each other on a global scale, but a global market in digital assets must avoid excessive leverage and deliver liquidity as well as distribution.

Digital asset issuance: Has anything really changed?