America’s regulators, not its coders, are now setting the pace in digital assets
On July 7th Sony Bank received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish Connectia Trust, a New York entity capitalised at $40m and wholly owned by the Japanese lender. It will not take deposits or make loans. Its sole purpose is to issue, custody and redeem a dollar stablecoin, eventually for buyers of PlayStation games and anime. Final approval is pending in both Washington and Tokyo; a token is not expected before 2027.
The route matters more than the destination. Sony has followed the path Circle took to its own national trust charter earlier this month, under the GENIUS Act, which mandates one-to-one reserve backing, audits and sanctions compliance in exchange for federally qualified issuer status. Japan’s domestic regime offers nothing comparable, which is why a Japanese bank is issuing a dollar token from New York. An industry founded on the premise that permission was unnecessary now finds that the permission is the product.
The week’s larger development came from an institution never accused of disruption. On July 15th the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation processed live production trades in tokenised American equities, exchange-traded funds and Treasuries. More than 30 firms took part, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Vanguard, Citadel Securities, CME Group, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. Settlement ran across two networks, Hyperledger Besu and Canton, under a no-action letter from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
What DTCC created were digital twins: on-chain representations of securities it already custodies, carrying identical ownership, dividend and governance rights and convertible back to conventional form at will. In the most instructive trade, JPMorgan tokenised a holding of the Invesco QQQ Trust and posted it as margin at CME, moving collateral without unwinding the underlying position. That is the case for tokenisation without the evangelism. No new asset, no new legal wrapper and no requirement that issuers opt in. The same security, in more places, sooner.
Scepticism is still warranted. DTCC settled $4.7 quadrillion of transactions in 2025, against which a single day of tokenised trading is a rounding error, and a successful production run is not evidence of commercial demand. The service launches in October, covering Russell 1000 equities, index ETFs and Treasuries. Elsewhere the timelines are longer still. Britain’s 54-member tokenisation taskforce is targeting a repo pilot in spring 2027, with tokenised gilts to follow. The London Stock Exchange will not open its overnight venue until the first half of 2027.
The pattern holds across the rest of the week’s news. Visa has launched a platform allowing banks and fintechs to issue and settle stablecoins, built initially around OpenUSD, which reportedly waives minting and redemption fees and directs most reserve income to distribution partners. Bank of America has appointed leaders for tokenised deposits, stablecoins, digital collateral and crypto custody. Vietnam is examining the tokenisation of nearly $4bn of infrastructure in Da Nang. In each case the technology is being absorbed by incumbents rather than deployed against them.
Two conclusions follow. The first is that competition in digital assets has moved from protocols to distribution, and from cryptography to charters. The second is less comfortable for the incumbents. If the OCC will charter a games company to issue dollars, the barrier to entry it once represented has become a queue rather than a wall.
