The future of payments and financial markets is taking shape – and has to some extent already arrived – in the form of cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and a variety of instruments in tokenized form including deposits, equities and other so-called real-world assets. The origin of bitcoin, after a paper published in 2008, was a big bang that continues to expand and proliferate, and that traditional market structures and regulatory frameworks are still coming to grips with.
Underlying this digitization is an infrastructure layer of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Most familiar is the bitcoin blockchain, which has, in turn, given rise to Ethereum, Solana, Stellar and numerous others and, out of necessity, the concept of cross-chain interoperability.
It all may be new and disruptive, but there is nothing more central to finance, traditional or otherwise, than ledgers. Central bankers, financial institutions and market utilities have been monitoring, working on and experimenting with distributed ledgers for as long as digital or crypto assets have been on the rise. Theories and proposals have competed for mind and market share.
A 2024 Bank for International Settlements paper by then-general manager Agustín Carstens and Nandan Nilekani fleshed out unified ledgers: “a promising vehicle to turn our vision of an efficient future financial system into reality. These are digital platforms that bring together multiple financial asset markets – such as for wholesale tokenized central bank money, tokenized commercial bank deposits and other tokenized assets, including company shares, corporate or government bonds and real estate, to name just a few – as executable objects on common programmable platforms.”
Laurence B. Mussio, co-founder and chair of the Long Run Institute and special advisor to the CEO of BMO Financial Group, and Paul Samson, president of the Centre for International Governance Innovation, offered both a historical and geopolitical framing in a June article, How the Ledger Controls Monetary Sovereignty and Global Power:
“Monetary Sovereignty” co-author Paul Samson
“History has shown, again and again, that it is the ledger, not the sword, that has proven most sovereign . . . From Sumerian clay to Californian blockchain, whoever controls the inscription of value controls power. The ledger is mnemonic capital – a reservoir of recorded obligation that compounds authority across time.”
“The arithmetic is merciless,” Mussio and Samson concluded. “Stablecoin transfers settle in seconds for fractions of a cent. Senders will take the faster, cheaper rail – every time, without sentiment, without ceremony. Sovereignty bleeds out through a thousand daily transactions. These are strategic choices with generational consequences. A nation that does not command its own digital payment architecture will discover, too late, that it has surrendered its monetary sovereignty. And sovereignty, once ceded, is seldom recovered.”
Developed by Range, which in June raised $8.3 million in a Series A venture capital round, the Unify “system of record across all sources, including digital assets and bank balances,” is a functioning unified ledger.
"Stablecoins and fiat are converging, and finance teams need one platform to run both safely and at scale," stated Range co-founder and CEO Andres Monteoliva. With its companion Protect control layer, Range “protects more than $30B in customer assets under management and carries 10,000+ integrations with banks, custodians, and wallets,” said the company, whose users include Circle Internet Group, the Solana Foundation and Stellar.
A longer-standing crypto native in the mix is Ripple, which now bills itself as “the leading provider of blockchain-based enterprise solutions across traditional and digital finance.” The 2012 launch of Ripple’s native XRP currency inaugurated the XRP Ledger (XRPL), a decentralized layer 1 blockchain.
Markus Infanger of RippleX
In May, with the Mastercard Multi-Token Network and other pilot participants, XRPL was used in the completion of “the first near-real-time cross-border, cross-bank redemption of a tokenized U.S. Treasury fund.” It was a “meaningful step forward in demonstrating that tokenized assets can move seamlessly between public blockchain infrastructure and the global financial system,” said RippleX senior vice president Markus Infanger. “The XRP Ledger enables real-time asset movement, and when paired with global banking infrastructure, this pilot shows how institutions can execute cross-border transactions as a single, integrated flow.”
An “establishment” collaboration making a global impact is Project Agorá – convened by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF), also involving the Bank of England, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Bank of France (representing the Eurosystem), Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, Swiss National Bank, and more than 40 private-sector financial institutions.
A report in May on the Agorá prototype described “how tokenization and programmable technologies can address long-standing inefficiencies in wholesale cross-border payments at scale.”
The ongoing project under BIS Innovation Hub auspices, with the Bank of Canada newly on board, is a landmark digital ledger implementation, featuring multi-currency settlement using tokenized central bank reserves and tokenized commercial bank deposits; and atomic settlement on an “all-or-nothing” basis securely across currencies and jurisdictions.
Agorá is just one of a number of advances resulting from collective efforts with influential and sizable participation – accompanied by a desire to emphasize collaboration and avoid the downsides of fragmentation.
Post-trade utility giant Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC), along with its Europe-based counterparts Clearstream and Euroclear and Boston Consulting Group, in a white paper this year titled “Building the Path Towards Digital Asset Securities Interoperability,” identified “fragmentation across emerging DLT networks as a challenge the industry needs to address and overcome.” They proposed a “path forward for the industry to collaborate on data standardization, process harmonization and roles consistency.”
“The different ledgers of the market,” said the paper, “must agree when something is final. In addition, due to the shared source-of-truth paradigm, they must carefully manage what can be seen, how programs run, and when and from whom operations are accepted.”
Interoperability frictions across stages and participants in digital asset securities (DAS)-to-fiat currency settlements, from Building the Path Towards Digital Asset Securities Interoperability.
“Interoperability is the cornerstone for digital assets adoption and scalability,” said DTCC Managing Director and Head of Digital Assets Nadine Chakar. “Participants must focus on data, standards and sound risk management as common objectives to bridge TradFi and DeFi with integrity, security and trust. The security control principles and interoperability framework provide a practical approach to apply shared standards for data, implement uniform processes and adequately assign roles that the industry can adopt today.”
The recent Citi Institute Tokenization 2030 report noted, “As of May 2025, financial services entities had adopted at least 72 different distributed or programmable ledgers. These ‘digital islands’ are not inherently interoperable, limiting the ability to trade, settle, and move assets seamlessly across networks.”
An example of the industry’s “converging around a smaller set of networks and interoperability solutions,” the Citi report said, is the Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). “A 2023 collaboration between ANZ Bank and Chainlink demonstrated how CCIP can connect private, permissioned blockchain with public networks such as Ethereum, enabling settlement of tokenized assets across institutional and decentralized environments.”
The researchers cited incumbents such as DTCC, Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange as market catalysts, “integrating tokenization into core issuance, trading and settlement rails. This approach prioritizes legal certainty, investor protection and institutional adoption over speed of disruption, positioning existing market rails as a bridge to digitally native, on-chain financial systems.”
“The next phase of [decentralized finance] development is likely to depend less on speculative activity and more on the integration of real-world and financial assets on-chain,” said the Citi paper. “This could help expand the collateral base, enabling use in lending, borrowing, and liquidity provision and supporting more sustainable yield.”
Who controls the ecosystem in a tokenized market? Source: Citi Institute.
In January, the Swift financial messaging consortium announced with BNP Paribas Securities Services, Intesa Sanpaolo and Societe Generale – Forge completion of a digital-asset interoperability trial. This was Swfit’s latest in a series of digital-asset and currency trials involving firms such as Citi, HSBC, Northern Trust and Chainlink.
As a neutral party, Swift aims to promote compatibility, security and efficiency through ISO standards and accepted market practices.
“By proving that Swift can orchestrate multi-platform tokenized asset transactions, we’re paving the way for our members to adopt digital assets with confidence, and at scale. It’s about creating a bridge between traditional finance and emerging technologies,” said Thomas Dugauquier, Swift’s Tokenized Assets product lead.
As of July 9, Swift’s blockchain-based ledger was ready for initial use. Seventeen banks internationally were lined up to pilot live transactions on a shared ledger providing “a secure orchestration layer for bank-issued tokenized deposits on their own ledgers, enabling them to move funds for customers – including overnight and on weekends – before completing final settlement through existing systems.”
Swift itself took part in the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) Regulated Settlement Network (RSN) project. It grew out of the Regulated Liability Network (RLN) of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s New York Innovation Center, dating back to 2024.
SIFMA’s Charles DeSimone
“The RSN was designed to provide a tokenized settlement model that allows more efficient use of funds for liquidity on a faster, programmable, precise basis. This is a great benefit for risk management, as is its transparency and auditability,” explained Charles DeSimone, managing director and deputy head of Technology, Operations and BCP (business continuity planning) Group at SIFMA.
Offering intraday batch settlement, RSN allowed users to design on-chain operating models reflecting the overall market ecosystem, according to DeSimone. “It provided a way to preserve risk-reducing elements of the market and settlement infrastructures, while making enhancements, as opposed to needing to invent something totally new.”
The RSN was a proof of concept positioned as a model for digital-asset regulatory frameworks and tokenization.
In February, DTCC announced participation in the Zero blockchain, led by LayerZero and aiming to launch this fall. Others named in the announcement included Citadel Securities, Google Cloud and Intercontinental Exchange. Ark Invest made an investment in LayerZero, and the tech investment firm’s CEO, Cathie Wood, joined the platform’s advisory board.
Zero’s value proposition is heterogeneous architecture, decoupling transaction execution from verification and thereby overcoming the replication requirement that caps blockchain transaction capacity at 10,000 per second. DTCC sees potential to leverage the architecture in the DTC tokenization service – supported by a working group consisting of “a broad cross section of the TradFi and DeFi ecosystems, including custodians, asset managers, brokers, trading venues, application and back-office service providers, and more” – and the Collateral AppChain with Chainlink.
LayerZero Labs CEO Bryan Pellegrino
“By working collaboratively across the industry, we believe that we can unlock the value of blockchain and deliver transformational benefits to market participants, including collateral mobility, new trading modalities and programmable assets,” stated DTCC President and CEO Frank La Salla. “We look forward to working with LayerZero and others to further advance our digital strategy by tokenizing securities with uncompromising security, robust scalability, sound legal footing and seamless interoperability.”
In March, Particula, a company that rates the risks of tokenized assets, integrated LayerZero’s interoperability protocol into the Particula Digital Asset Risk Passport (PDARP). This makes PDARP available on any chain that LayerZero supports, helping to keep risk profiles accessible on multiple networks.
Also in March, LayerZero integrated with the institutional-grade, privacy- and compliance-oriented Canton Network. Canton was developed by Digital Asset, the pioneering financial industry blockchain developer in which DTCC invested at an early stage and with which it has partnered.
“Canton has already built the rails for traditional finance, processing more than $350B in daily U.S. Treasury repo volume,” LayerZero Labs CEO Bryan Pellegrino said in a statement. “LayerZero’s job is to make sure those assets are available in every global market, across blockchains. By enabling assets to move easily between Canton and all public blockchains, LayerZero is hopefully increasing the velocity of global tokenized capital. A tokenized asset should be able to live anywhere, and now, it can.”
Announcing a recent $355 million capital raise, Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz said, “For capital markets to move on-chain, institutions need infrastructure that reflects how they actually operate – with privacy, compliance, scale, and interoperability built in from the start. Canton was purpose-built for this, and Digital Asset is working with more than 700 ecosystem participants to make Canton the core infrastructure for global finance.”
Tradeweb Markets announced on July 1 “completion of a landmark real-time transaction involving tokenized U.S. Treasuries . . . Franklin Templeton transferred a tokenized U.S. Treasury security to Virtu Financial in exchange for USDCx [tokenized cash]. Tradeweb provided the execution platform and price discovery, while the Canton Network enabled synchronized on-chain settlement between the two assets.”
Anticipating DTCC Tokenization Services later this year, Kelly Mathieson, Digital Asset’s chief business development officer, said, “This is another key milestone as we work alongside market participants to build an always-on, interoperable and secure capital markets infrastructure. Unlocking 24/7 market making enhances the utility of assets and propels the evolution of markets toward greater efficiency and accessibility.”
Jeffrey Kutler of GARP contributed reporting for this article.