For years, tokenisation was treated as one of those financial technologies that produced more conference panels than consequences. It belonged in the same cupboard as metaverse banking lounges and solemn predictions about buying coffee with Bitcoin. This week, however, it began to look less like a crypto subplot and more like the next contest over financial infrastructure.
Citi’s latest projection is suitably eye-watering: tokenised assets rising from about $17 billion today to $5.5 trillion by 2030, with an upside case above $8 trillion. The important part is not the size of the number, though bankers do enjoy a large number. It is what Citi thinks will drive it. Not obscure private funds or esoteric crypto-native instruments, but the great slabs of global finance: public equities, public fixed income, collateral, repo and intraday funding.
In other words, tokenisation is not about changing what an asset is. A bad bond does not become a good bond because it has been sprinkled with blockchain dust. A tokenised share still depends on the same company, the same cash flows and the same risks. The change is in how assets move, settle, pledge and interact with market infrastructure. Tokenisation is less alchemy than plumbing — but plumbing, as the City knows, is where empires are maintained.
That is why the most interesting developments are coming not from crypto start-ups but from incumbents. Goldman Sachs’ Digital Asset Platform is now providing infrastructure for a blockchain-native real estate fund managed by LRC Group, with Apex and Archax involved in administration and custody. This is not the death of intermediaries. It is their mutation. Fund administrators, custodians and exchanges do not vanish on-chain; they become the operators of permissioning, compliance, reporting and control.
Britain appears to have noticed. The Bank of England and FCA have now formally positioned tokenisation as part of the future of wholesale markets, not a sandbox curiosity. Their emerging model is a hybrid one: tokenised securities, tokenised cash and tokenised collateral sitting alongside existing rails, with broadly equivalent regulatory treatment. The proposed Digital Gilt Instrument matters because it would give the UK a sovereign anchor for this new market architecture.
The Bank is also extending the operating hours of RTGS and CHAPS, with settlement availability rising from 12 to 16.5 hours a day from 2027 and consultations pointing towards near-continuous operations thereafter. This is the quiet admission that money can no longer keep bank hours. Stablecoins, tokenised deposits and programmable collateral all assume a world in which liquidity moves at any time. The old system must either adapt or watch activity migrate elsewhere.
Still, there is a familiar British danger: understanding the problem, then regulating it into dampness. The Lords’ warning on stablecoins is therefore well timed. The UK is moving, but it still trails the US and EU in clarity. A market worth more than $300 billion, settling tens of trillions annually, is no longer a crypto curiosity. It is financial infrastructure.
The question is whether Britain wants to supervise the future — or merely publish thoughtful consultations about it.
