The week in digital assets was less about coins than about control of the ledger
For a decade the crypto debate was about whether money would move onto blockchains. This week suggested that a duller but more consequential argument has replaced it: whose ledger, run by whom, under what rules. A state, a bank consortium, two incumbent banks and a securities regulator each staked a claim.
Start with the state. Russia has begun a nationwide rollout of its digital rouble, making it one of the few countries with a live central-bank digital currency (CBDC). Twelve big banks are taking part, and the largest banks and retailers must support it. The digital rouble trades at par with cash but sits on the Bank of Russia’s own platform, pays no interest and carries a monthly limit of 300,000 roubles, which makes it a poor place to save. Fee incentives sweeten it. The Kremlin also hopes such rails will loosen its dependence on Western payment systems, though few foreigners accept the currency. The rollout is a test of a question CBDC enthusiasts prefer to avoid: will anyone use central-bank digital money unless they are made to?
Switzerland offers the consortium model. SIX, the country’s exchange operator, and TWINT, its most popular payments app, have joined UBS, PostFinance and five others in a live sandbox for CHFD, a digital franc. The recruitment of a payments app is telling. A stablecoin is only as useful as the places that accept it, and the Swiss banks seem to grasp that issuance is the easy part.
The incumbents’ reply came from BNP Paribas and HSBC, which executed what they describe as the first cross-border tokenised-deposit foreign-exchange trade, swapping euros into sterling for Siemens. SWIFT, the bank-messaging network, coordinated it. Siemens needed no new wallet, only its existing banking relationships. That is the banks’ pitch in a sentence: programmable money without leaving the regulatory perimeter. It explains why HSBC and Standard Chartered are pressing on with deposit tokens, even as stablecoins recorded $33trn of transactions in 2025, a headline figure inflated by automated trading. Mastercard, meanwhile, is keeping its options open by exploring settlement on the XRP Ledger using RLUSD, Ripple’s stablecoin.
Then the regulator. America’s Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed the first substantive overhaul of its transfer-agent rules in more than four decades. Transfer agents keep the official record of who owns a company’s securities. Under the proposal, a distributed ledger could form part or all of that record. Blockchains would graduate from mirroring the register to being it. Awkward questions remain: who stands behind a wallet, who controls assets on a public chain, and which record prevails when on-chain and off-chain versions disagree. The SEC’s answer is to leave liability with the transfer agent. That favours firms able to marry tokenisation with legally sound ownership records, a job for lawyers as much as for coders.
Not everything was plumbing. Robinhood has teamed up with Crypto.com to offer prediction markets, plugging a regulated exchange into its vast retail base. The deal says a lot about where crypto firms now find revenue: less in crypto, more in whatever retail punters will bet on.
The common thread is control. A state ledger, a shared bank network, deposits routed through SWIFT and a regulated register on a blockchain are four different answers to the question of who stands behind digital money. Russia’s experiment will show whether mandates can create demand, and Switzerland’s whether a consortium can cultivate it. The big banks are wagering that neither matters if customers never have to leave the bank at all.
