TL;DR
- The UK is advancing its strategy to bring tokenised assets into wholesale finance through a 54-member industry taskforce.
- The programme focuses on testing real transactions while identifying legal and regulatory barriers to adoption.
- Its success depends on whether working transactions and regulatory clarity can develop together.
The UK has launched a 12-month industry programme to test how tokenised assets could work across wholesale finance. The plan to tokenise UK financial markets brings together 54 companies, including major banks, market operators and crypto firms.
HM Treasury first set out the strategy behind this in its Wholesale Financial Markets Digital Strategy, published in July 2025 as part of that year’s Leeds Reforms. Chris Woolard CBE, former interim chief executive of the FCA, was appointed Wholesale Digital Markets Champion in April 2026 to lead delivery of that strategy. His terms of reference, published in June 2026, committed him to two reports: an initial report and taskforce launch by July 2026, and a fuller report on distributed ledger technology adoption and interoperability standards due to the Chancellor by July 2027. The July 13 report fulfils that first milestone.
This moves it out of the policy stage and into actual work. But there is still no live market, not even a finished pilot. The real question now is whether it can produce a working transaction and not just another round of pilots.
A roadmap built around real transactions
The report convenes 54 UK businesses into the Digital Markets Champion Industry Taskforce, chaired by Chris Woolard, HM Treasury’s Wholesale Digital Markets Champion. The City of London Corporation is supporting the work alongside industry groups and UK authorities.
The taskforce includes financial institutions like BlackRock, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC and JPMorgan. Market infrastructure providers such as DTCC, Euroclear and Clearstream are also involved, alongside crypto firms including Circle, Coinbase, Kraken and Ripple.
The programme will organize the participants in nine action groups covering areas such as primary issuance, tokenised collateral, funds, payment systems and interoperability between platforms.
Tokenisation could record securities and transaction data on distributed ledger technology, potentially simplifying ownership transfers and settlement. The challenge is ensuring that these systems operate reliably within existing market infrastructure and legal frameworks.
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UK financial market tokenisation starts with repo
Their first shared use case will focus on the repo market. In a repo transaction, one party sells securities for cash and agrees to buy them back later. Banks rely on these short-term arrangements to manage liquidity and funding.
The programme targets the first tokenised repo trial for spring 2027. A completed transaction will be the first meaningful test of whether tokenisation can work in UK financial markets.
The tokenisation roadmap also connects with DIGIT, the UK’s planned digital gilt instrument. A gilt is a bond issued by the British government. DIGIT is intended to explore government debt issuance using distributed ledger technology, though no issuance has yet taken place.
The biggest claims remain projections
The report estimates that tokenisation could add up to £33 billion to annual UK economic output by 2035. This would add as much as £14 billion in annual tax revenue to the Treasury.
But these potential outcomes will depend on adoption levels, productivity gains and the eventual scale of tokenised markets.
The report also references projections that tokenised real-world assets could reach $88 trillion globally by 2035. However, as of 2025, tokenised assets represented only a small share of investable markets. The gap between current adoption and long-term forecasts is still huge.
The FX market in London is massive. It’s one of the largest, most liquid markets in the world. Being able to find efficiencies in that type of environment can really unlock tremendous flows.
Gregg Bell, CIO at Hashgraph
Regulation and interoperability will decide the outcome
Technology is only one component of the programme. One of the taskforce’s nine action groups is dedicated specifically to legal and regulatory certainty. It will be tasked with surfacing where firms need clarity on legal ownership, capital treatment, tax rules and financial-crime controls before tokenised markets can scale.
The taskforce cannot settle these questions on its own, but it can flag barriers and propose fixes to authorities and lawmakers.
These legal questions carry the most weight when tokenised assets are used as collateral. Financial institutions must be able to enforce their rights in the event of a counterparty failure. At the same time, regulators need visibility into how such transactions affect liquidity and risk system-wide.
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At this point, two things have to happen: a transaction needs to work, and the rules need to catch up if tokenisation is going to scale across UK financial markets. The repo trial will test the first. Whether regulators move at the same pace is a separate question.
Industry feedback on the initial report remains open until September 4, 2026. Attention will then shift to whether the planned repo trial can convert a broad institutional coalition into a functioning market process by spring 2027.
