Financial firms are accelerating efforts to tokenise real-world assets on blockchain networks to achieve faster settlement and greater operational efficiency, industry executives said at FIA Expo on 17 November.
Panellists said interest has grown this year as financial institutions explore blockchain-based collateral mobility and round-the-clock settlement, with fresh momentum coming from US President Donald Trump’s crypto-friendly administration.
As an example, DTCC, Bank of America, stablecoin issuer Circle and a host of other financial institutions recently completed on-chain financing of US Treasuries against the USDC stablecoin using Digital Asset’s Canton Network – a project the participants described as “groundbreaking”. The transactions were executed on Tradeweb and provided near-instant atomic settlement outside traditional market hours.
“It was not simply a test. It was a series of live transactions,” said Tom Sullivan, managing director for digital assets at DTCC. “This is a real proof point that traditional markets and digital asset markets are converging.”
He said the initiative aimed to solve a persistent market challenge: accessing high-quality collateral outside traditional operating hours. “Professional actors…want to be able to post actual Treasuries, receive USDC or other stablecoins and be able to complete those transactions. That’s what we were able to demonstrate, and that's really the starting point. It expands to a much larger universe of things that we can do,” Sullivan added.
Kelly Mathieson, chief business development officer at Digital Asset, said the project required all participants to be onboarded to the Canton Network. While the live transactions themselves were relatively straightforward, Mathieson noted that “new relationships, new ways of financing and new types of legal entities” were required to support the process. Establishing the legal and operational framework, she said, was the most time-consuming element of the project.
Franklin Templeton is also expanding its tokenisation efforts. Mike Reed, who leads digital-asset partnership development, said the firm had “authentically tokenised” a money-market fund – the Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund – and several investment products via its Benji technology platform, which integrated with the Canton Global Collateral Network earlier this month.
“When the asset lives authentically on-chain, it can authentically move around 24/7,” he said. Reed also noted that Franklin Templeton’s tokenised money market funds are being used as collateral through a partnership with Standard Chartered and crypto exchange OKX. This has attracted inquiries from both crypto-native and traditional hedge funds who want to participate in this space with collateral they understand, he said.
From a clearing member's perspective, Bank of America discussed another use case for tokenised collateral: initial margin. “To be able to mint a token of a real-world asset and deploy that instantaneously as initial margin, anywhere around the world – that’s the future use case,” said Joel Stainton, head of EMEA futures and options and OTC clearing. Faster collateral substitution, he said, could deliver “very meaningful” capital and operational efficiencies to clearing firms and clients.
Panellists said greater interoperability across blockchains will be essential as adoption scales. Edward Woodford, chief executive of zerohash, a provider of on-chain infrastructure, said the proliferation of assets across multiple networks is magnifying complexity. “If you just look at stablecoins…it’s the same asset but on many different chains. The number of permutations grows exponentially,” he said. Simplifying that via interoperability “is a huge opportunity,” he added.
Executives also urged regulatory and legal clarity, particularly around whether clearinghouses will be able to accept tokenised collateral. Stainton said he expects this to start happening in 2026 – but only if regulators confirm that tokenised assets confer the same ownership rights as the underlying securities, thereby giving CCPs the confidence to accept them.
Clearing members will also require absolute legal certainty that, in the event of a default, the judges in all relevant jurisdictions will recognise ledger entries as definitive evidence of ownership, Stainton said.
“The technology exists. The interest definitely exists. The use cases exist,” he said. “We need absolute legal certainty…and that is the one piece of the puzzle yet to come in. I’m optimistic about 2026.”
