The new bill has dropped. Yesterday, Republicans released the latest Clarity Act text, a 616-page merger of the Senate Agriculture and Banking Committee versions, now with added ethics language on how federal officials (e.g. the U.S. President) can profit from digital assets while in office.

That provision has been the single biggest roadblock to bipartisan support. And by the early reactions, adding it hasn't moved the bill much closer to the finish line.

According to Punchbowl News, politicians on both sides are picking apart the freshly written restrictions. To be fair, they do seem light:

• Officials and their spouses can't issue or sponsor new digital assets for compensation while in office, but existing holdings and businesses can largely be kept through divestiture or a blind trust.

• The rules only take effect after an implementation period of up to a year.

• The entire regime expires at noon on January 20, 2029, erasing even liability for earlier violations.

As a reminder: According to Trump's own 2025 financial disclosure, he booked more than $1.4 billion in crypto-related income last year, his single largest source of earnings.

Given that track record, you can see why rubber-stamping ethics provisions this porous doesn't come easily to your political opponent.

Still, yesterday was likely just the starting gun on what everyone hopes is the final stretch. And sometimes perfect really is the enemy of good.

So here's our unsolicited wisdom from across the Atlantic: sometimes it’s worth turning complex decisions into simple questions.

In this case, senators on both sides might ask themselves which is worse: no ethics rules and no consumer protection at all, or thin ethics rules attached to a law that finally brings clarity to the market?

_____________

Housekeeping: Starting next week, the Blockstories editorial team is taking a two-week summer break. We’ll be back in August.

For a bit of infotainment in the meantime, we’ve put together a short aftermovie from our Horizon Summer Series, featuring the best 8 slides from keynotes on stablecoins, tokenization, vaults, and infrastructure. You can watch it here.

• Morgan Stanley completes rollout of crypto spot trading

• Visa introduces stablecoin management platform

Visa Launches Stablecoin Platform for Financial Institutions

Stablecoin platform: Last week, payments giant Visa introduced its Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP), designed to help financial institutions and enterprises hold, move, and manage stablecoins through a single Visa-managed environment. The platform will initially support Open USD (OUSD) and launch in beta to a limited group of customers.

• Why it matters: The launch comes amid a wave of solutions designed to move enterprise payments and treasury operations onchain. Banks such as HSBC and JPMorgan are building infrastructure around tokenized deposits, while fintechs like Stripe and a new breed of orchestration platforms are pursuing the same opportunity through stablecoins. All are seeking to capture recurring enterprise financial activity by moving core money flows onto rails that are always on.

Years in the making: Visa has been building toward this since 2023, when it began allowing issuer and acquirer partners to settle their obligations to the network in USDC. It has since extended stablecoin support to Visa Direct, its real-time payouts network. Adoption is growing quickly: as of April, Visa reported a $7 billion annualized stablecoin settlement run rate, up 50% quarter over quarter.

Bringing it all together: With VSP, Visa is moving from individual stablecoin integrations toward a more unified platform, bundling key capabilities so institutions can more easily embed stablecoins into payment and treasury workflows. A central, new component is its Wallet-as-a-Service layer, which brings stablecoin functionality into back-end operations while adding controls such as dual approvals, audit logs, and transfer allow lists.

Acquirer settlement: Beyond treasury, those wallets open up a second use case, which is acquirer settlement. Through VSP, acquirers, the firms that enable merchants to accept card payments, can take their settlement funds from Visa in stablecoins rather than bank deposits.

• “The big use case I keep coming back to is the opportunity around acquirer settlement. We’re working hard to enable Visa acquirers to settle in stablecoins like OUSD so acquirers can receive funds faster, merchants can get paid faster, merchants can pay suppliers faster, and ultimately create that entire cycle,” explained Cuy Sheffield, Head of Visa Crypto Labs, on the Tokenized Podcast.

Starting with OUSD: The token at the center of that cycle also gives Visa an economic stake in its success. OUSD was introduced just last month by the Open Standard consortium, whose more than 140 members include Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, Coinbase, BlackRock, and Standard Chartered. OUSD distributes the yield on its reserves to participating members, something Circle, the issuer Visa has historically supported, does not.

A flywheel for OUSD: For Visa, those earnings grow with the amount of OUSD in circulation, and settlement is one way to get it circulating. Every payout in the token would put new OUSD into use through ordinary card volume.

• “Acquirer settlement is a major distribution opportunity. Imagine that every time someone spends at a merchant acquired by an OUSD member, OUSD is minted, paid out to the acquirer, and ultimately reaches the merchant. We’re still at a very early stage. The issuing side is already well developed, but now we need to get the acquiring side going,” added the Head of Visa Crypto Labs.

Outlook: For now, neither OUSD nor VSP is broadly available, with the stablecoin not yet live and the platform in beta without named customers or a launch date. Competitors are moving in parallel, from Mastercard’s $1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK to Stripe’s build-out around Bridge and the Tempo blockchain. In his expert perspective below, Luis Schaubhut of AllUnity breaks down what this means for the competitive landscape.

1. China’s Central Bank Digital Currency 2.0 and the Future of Digital Finance (CIGI) — This paper provides a deep dive on how China has redesigned the digital yuan from digital cash into an interest-bearing digital deposit. It explains how the new model aims to strengthen commercial banks, compete with stablecoins, and reshape cross-border payments through a hybrid CBDC architecture.

2. MiCAR versus the GENIUS Act (European Parliament) — In this briefing, the European Parliament compares the European and U.S. regulatory approaches to digital assets and stablecoins. It explains how MiCA and the GENIUS Act differ less in their treatment of stablecoins than in the way they integrate digital assets into existing financial and supervisory frameworks.

Moving forward: Last week, Swift said its blockchain-based ledger was ready for initial use. Seventeen banks, including Citi, Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas, and BNY, are preparing live pilot transactions using tokenized deposits for 24/7 cross-border payments.

• Why it matters: Banks have already shown tokenized deposits work inside a single institution, moving them between two clients of the same bank. Between different banks, it is harder, because the token stays a claim on the bank that issued it and cannot simply become money on Bank B’s balance sheet. The two must first agree on what changed on their books and how the debt settles. Swift is positioning its ledger as where that coordination happens, though it is only one approach among several. The BIS’ Project Agorá, The Clearing House, and others are building alternative architectures for the same problem.

Nine months in: The milestone comes nine months after Swift unveiled the project at Sibos in Frankfurt. Behind the scenes, however, several people familiar with the work told Blockstories the platform remains a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), with scalability still some way off.

What the ledger actually does: The ledger records and synchronizes what banks owe each other, but does not itself provide the asset used for final settlement. Built on Hyperledger Besu, it sits between the banks’ own tokenized deposit systems and validates their commitments, while each bank keeps control of its keys, assets, and liquidity. Final settlement, when the interbank obligation is extinguished, still takes place through RTGS, correspondent banking, or another agreed mechanism.

Payment now, settlement later: Those settlement rails are also why timing, not speed, is the real constraint. Swift already moves fast, with 75% of payments reaching the beneficiary bank within ten minutes. Much of the remaining delay comes afterwards, before the customer is credited, particularly outside conventional settlement hours. The ledger targets that gap, letting banks act on validated commitments so funds can be made available before final settlement completes.

The risk does not disappear: However, making funds available first does not erase the risk behind it. If Bank B credits its customer before Bank A has settled, the timing gap must be covered through prefunding, reserved liquidity, collateral, or credit limits. Swift has not disclosed how this will work at scale.

Still an MVP: That unresolved gap is why people involved describe the current build as a feasibility test. The hard parts left are managing liquidity, offsetting payments against each other, and fixing the exact point a payment becomes legally final.

• “Everyone basically agrees that what is being tested now is a technical test, but probably not very realistic as the scalable solution,” one person involved in the longer-term design discussions told Blockstories.

Why Agorá is the real contrast: Those settlement questions are what separate Swift’s design from Project Agorá’s, the highest-profile competing initiative, led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Agorá places tokenized central-bank reserves on the shared platform alongside commercial-bank deposits, letting the payment chain settle atomically. Swift’s MVP takes a narrower route, with final settlement remaining off-ledger.

• “Agorá is further ahead on settlement because it has already tested a model using central-bank money. Swift has the advantage of being connected to the banks,” one person familiar with both initiatives told Blockstories.

The timing: Agorá also sets the clock. The BIS completed the prototype in May with seven central banks and more than 40 institutions and has said the next phase will include real-value transactions. Several sources familiar with the matter told Blockstories that Agorá has completed a further set of test transactions, with results awaiting publication, and read Swift’s announcement as an effort to get ahead of the project. Sibos returns at the end of September, this time in Miami, giving Swift reason to have a visible transaction in hand.

Outlook: Zooming out, the ledger is among Swift’s most strategic bets, but it is only one piece of a wider effort that also includes its push on ISO 20022 data standards. It arrives during a leadership reshuffle, with former Chief Innovation Officer Tom Zschach having departed. The pilots will test whether banks can sync these payments across institutions. Harder still is whether Swift can build a liquidity and risk model that actually holds up at scale.

We’ve heard this story before, but this time it really does look like showdown territory for the Clarity Act.

According to various reports, a new draft of the US market structure bill is expected to hit the Senate any day now. It merges the two bills that the Banking and Agriculture Committees advanced earlier this year.

Once introduced, the Senate has until August 7 to find 60 votes before the summer recess. Miss that window, and the bill drifts into midterm campaigning and fall spending debates, where floor time is scarce and bipartisan votes even scarcer.

Passage requires at least seven Democrats to cross over, and even then the House still waits. All that political friction is why Polymarket currently puts the odds of the bill being signed into law this year at just 41%, a figure that still includes the September and lame-duck paths, not only passage before August.

Source: Polymarket

Not everyone is waiting for clarity, though. Yesterday, the DTCC processed its first live production trades with tokenized securities.

You can think of it as a show match before the main event, which will be the full commercial launch of its tokenization service in October.

We covered the platform’s architecture back in May. The big takeaway from yesterday is that the DTCC can indeed tokenize and untokenize the $114 trillion in US securities it custodies.

Not surprising, exactly. But it does show that some corners of the industry generate their own clarity. No Senate votes required, just a no-action letter from a convinced regulator.

• The UK unveils a digital assets task force with BlackRock and JPMorgan

• Swift is set to launch an MVP of its shared ledger with 17 banks

Swift Opens Its Shared Ledger to Initial Use With 17 Banks

Moving forward: Last week, Swift said its blockchain-based ledger was ready for initial use. Seventeen banks, including Citi, Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas, and BNY, are preparing live pilot transactions using tokenized deposits for 24/7 cross-border payments.

• Why it matters: Banks have already shown tokenized deposits work inside a single institution, moving them between two clients of the same bank. Between different banks, it is harder, because the token stays a claim on the bank that issued it and cannot simply become money on Bank B’s balance sheet. The two must first agree on what changed on their books and how the debt settles. Swift is positioning its ledger as where that coordination happens, though it is only one approach among several. The BIS’ Project Agorá, The Clearing House, and others are building alternative architectures for the same problem.

Nine months in: The milestone comes nine months after Swift unveiled the project at Sibos in Frankfurt. Behind the scenes, however, several people familiar with the work told Blockstories the platform remains a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), with scalability still some way off.

What the ledger actually does: The ledger records and synchronizes what banks owe each other, but does not itself provide the asset used for final settlement. Built on Hyperledger Besu, it sits between the banks’ own tokenized deposit systems and validates their commitments, while each bank keeps control of its keys, assets, and liquidity. Final settlement, when the interbank obligation is extinguished, still takes place through RTGS, correspondent banking, or another agreed mechanism.

Payment now, settlement later: Those settlement rails are also why timing, not speed, is the real constraint. Swift already moves fast, with 75% of payments reaching the beneficiary bank within ten minutes. Much of the remaining delay comes afterwards, before the customer is credited, particularly outside conventional settlement hours. The ledger targets that gap, letting banks act on validated commitments so funds can be made available before final settlement completes.

The risk does not disappear: However, making funds available first does not erase the risk behind it. If Bank B credits its customer before Bank A has settled, the timing gap must be covered through prefunding, reserved liquidity, collateral, or credit limits. Swift has not disclosed how this will work at scale.

Still an MVP: That unresolved gap is why people involved describe the current build as a feasibility test. The hard parts left are managing liquidity, offsetting payments against each other, and fixing the exact point a payment becomes legally final.

• “Everyone basically agrees that what is being tested now is a technical test, but probably not very realistic as the scalable solution,” one person involved in the longer-term design discussions told Blockstories.

Why Agorá is the real contrast: Those settlement questions are what separate Swift’s design from Project Agorá’s, the highest-profile competing initiative, led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Agorá places tokenized central-bank reserves on the shared platform alongside commercial-bank deposits, letting the payment chain settle atomically. Swift’s MVP takes a narrower route, with final settlement remaining off-ledger.

• “Agorá is further ahead on settlement because it has already tested a model using central-bank money. Swift has the advantage of being connected to the banks,” one person familiar with both initiatives told Blockstories.

The timing: Agorá also sets the clock. The BIS completed the prototype in May with seven central banks and more than 40 institutions and has said the next phase will include real-value transactions. Several sources familiar with the matter told Blockstories that Agorá has completed a further set of test transactions, with results awaiting publication, and read Swift’s announcement as an effort to get ahead of the project. Sibos returns at the end of September, this time in Miami, giving Swift reason to have a visible transaction in hand.

Outlook: Zooming out, the ledger is among Swift’s most strategic bets, but it is only one piece of a wider effort that also includes its push on ISO 20022 data standards. It arrives during a leadership reshuffle, with former Chief Innovation Officer Tom Zschach having departed. The pilots will test whether banks can sync these payments across institutions. Harder still is whether Swift can build a liquidity and risk model that actually holds up at scale.

1. LCH SA Digital Asset Derivatives Clearing Rule Book (LSEG Post Trade) — This rulebook provides a behind-the-scenes look at how one of Europe's largest clearing houses is adapting its infrastructure for digital asset derivatives. It explains how crypto futures and options can be cleared under the same risk management, margining and default procedures used across traditional financial markets.

2. Multi-issuance Stablecoins and MiCA's First Stress Test (CEPS) — The paper argues that MiCA already supports multi-issuance stablecoins despite disagreements between the ECB, European Commission and Parliament.

Final rulebook: Last week, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published its final rules for regulating crypto-assets and stablecoins. The regime covers trading platforms, custody, and stablecoin issuance, while rules for systemic stablecoin issuers are still being finalized separately and will fall under Bank of England supervision. The full framework will take effect in October 2027.

• Why it matters: Despite its status as a global financial centre, the UK remains one of the last major jurisdictions without a dedicated crypto-assets and stablecoins framework. Across the EU, MiCA is now in full force since July 1. The U.S. passed the GENIUS Act last summer, while the CLARITY Act is now before the Senate. Singapore and Hong Kong have operated dedicated crypto regimes for several years.

Regulatory groundwork: The UK was not idle in the meantime. As early as January 2020, it required firms offering crypto exchange or wallet custody services to register with the FCA and fall under its anti-money-laundering (AML) supervision. To date, the regulator has received 408 applications and registered 67 firms, including Revolut as well as Coinbase and Kraken.

• “That registration regime is very similar to what happened in Europe with the VASP framework, where local rules preceded MiCA. The regulatory framework now being introduced is much broader and is intended to bring crypto firms closer to the MiFID regime that applies to traditional financial instruments,” Diego Ballon Ossio, partner at Clifford Chance, told Blockstories.

Stricter requirements: The new rules raise the bar well beyond AML checks. Firms will have to hold capital buffers against losses on risky assets and run annual stress tests to show they can withstand market shocks. Custody is where the UK diverges most sharply from Europe. Client crypto-assets must be held in a statutory trust defined by stricter rules, with the assets controlled by the provider located in the UK.

Regulating trading venues: Custody is one area the rules settle cleanly. Trading venues are less straightforward. Unlike traditional markets, crypto order books are often global, and forcing exchanges to create separate UK order books would fragment liquidity. The UK therefore plans to let exchanges serve UK users through a locally regulated entity while still giving them access to a global order book.

The offshore challenge: That answer raises a supervision challenge, though. Under UK law, authorizing a branch can mean authorising the entire legal entity behind it, difficult when the exchange sits offshore and no global framework yet allows for effective cross-border supervision.

• “Many crypto exchanges are established in jurisdictions such as the Seychelles or the Marshall Islands, but unlike in traditional finance, there are not yet the international supervisory arrangements needed to oversee them effectively. That makes approving those structures far more challenging, with no clear solution for now,” Ballon Ossio added.

The stablecoin retreat: The stablecoin side of the package moved in the softer direction throughout. Supervision splits between the FCA for non-systemic issuers and the Bank of England for systemic ones, and for the systemic tier the calibration eased on every line under industry pressure:

• The share of reserves required to be held as unremunerated central-bank deposits was cut from 40% to 30%, leaving up to 70% in short-term UK government debt.

• The proposed holding caps of £20,000 per individual and £10 million per business were dropped, replaced by a temporary £40 billion issuance ceiling per stablecoin.

• The FCA halved the capital charge on issuance from 2% to 1%.

Outlook: The timeline is now fixed. The FCA will accept applications from September 2026 to February 2027, before the regime takes effect on 25 October 2027, while the Bank of England's stablecoin consultation runs until 22 September 2026, with final rules expected by year-end. The FCA and the Bank will also consult on the move to shared supervision.

One of the last bastions of anti-crypto asset management is about to fall. On Monday, Vanguard posted a job for a Head of Digital Assets. The first in its history.

While its peers, BlackRock, Fidelity, Invesco, JPMorgan AM, State Street, spent the last three years issuing crypto ETPs and launching tokenized funds, Vanguard did the opposite. It stayed out.

The official reasoning, still posted on its site, is a preference for products that “generate cash flow in a transparent way, such as interest payments and dividends.”

The new job posting still doesn’t mention crypto once. What it does mention is tokenization, stablecoins, custody, and blockchain-based settlement. The mandate is to define the firm’s digital assets strategy, build a multi-year roadmap, and develop “client-facing digital asset capabilities.”

It’s not a full 180, and it didn’t come from nowhere. In December, Vanguard already began allowing clients to trade third-party crypto ETFs on its brokerage platform. And for two years now it has had a CEO, Salim Ramji, whose last job was running BlackRock’s iShares, where he oversaw the launch of IBIT, the iShares Bitcoin Trust.

And while Ramji might still feel comfortable watching his peers’ crypto ships sail off without him, he seems rightfully far less relaxed about missing a tech upgrade to the funds Vanguard already sells.

• UBS completes its first stablecoin payment

• FCA finalizes crypto rules

UK FCA Finalizes Long-Awaited Crypto Rules

Final rulebook: Last week, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published its final rules for regulating crypto-assets and stablecoins. The regime covers trading platforms, custody, and stablecoin issuance, while rules for systemic stablecoin issuers are still being finalized separately and will fall under Bank of England supervision. The full framework will take effect in October 2027.

• Why it matters: Despite its status as a global financial centre, the UK remains one of the last major jurisdictions without a dedicated crypto-assets and stablecoins framework. Across the EU, MiCA is now in full force since July 1. The U.S. passed the GENIUS Act last summer, while the CLARITY Act is now before the Senate. Singapore and Hong Kong have operated dedicated crypto regimes for several years.

Regulatory groundwork: The UK was not idle in the meantime. As early as January 2020, it required firms offering crypto exchange or wallet custody services to register with the FCA and fall under its anti-money-laundering (AML) supervision. To date, the regulator has received 408 applications and registered 67 firms, including Revolut as well as Coinbase and Kraken.

• “That registration regime is very similar to what happened in Europe with the VASP framework, where local rules preceded MiCA. The regulatory framework now being introduced is much broader and is intended to bring crypto firms closer to the MiFID regime that applies to traditional financial instruments,” Diego Ballon Ossio, partner at Clifford Chance, told Blockstories.

Stricter requirements: The new rules raise the bar well beyond AML checks. Firms will have to hold capital buffers against losses on risky assets and run annual stress tests to show they can withstand market shocks. Custody is where the UK diverges most sharply from Europe. Client crypto-assets must be held in a statutory trust defined by stricter rules, with the assets controlled by the provider located in the UK.

Regulating trading venues: Custody is one area the rules settle cleanly. Trading venues are less straightforward. Unlike traditional markets, crypto order books are often global, and forcing exchanges to create separate UK order books would fragment liquidity. The UK therefore plans to let exchanges serve UK users through a locally regulated entity while still giving them access to a global order book.

The offshore challenge: That answer raises a supervision challenge, though. Under UK law, authorizing a branch can mean authorising the entire legal entity behind it, difficult when the exchange sits offshore and no global framework yet allows for effective cross-border supervision.

• “Many crypto exchanges are established in jurisdictions such as the Seychelles or the Marshall Islands, but unlike in traditional finance, there are not yet the international supervisory arrangements needed to oversee them effectively. That makes approving those structures far more challenging, with no clear solution for now,” Ballon Ossio added.

The stablecoin retreat: The stablecoin side of the package moved in the softer direction throughout. Supervision splits between the FCA for non-systemic issuers and the Bank of England for systemic ones, and for the systemic tier the calibration eased on every line under industry pressure:

• The share of reserves required to be held as unremunerated central-bank deposits was cut from 40% to 30%, leaving up to 70% in short-term UK government debt.

• The proposed holding caps of £20,000 per individual and £10 million per business were dropped, replaced by a temporary £40 billion issuance ceiling per stablecoin.

• The FCA halved the capital charge on issuance from 2% to 1%.

Outlook: The timeline is now fixed. The FCA will accept applications from September 2026 to February 2027, before the regime takes effect on 25 October 2027, while the Bank of England's stablecoin consultation runs until 22 September 2026, with final rules expected by year-end. The FCA and the Bank will also consult on the move to shared supervision.

1. Ethereum Basics for Governments and Institutions (Ethereum Foundation) — This primer explains how Ethereum works, who governs it, and how it compares to other blockchains. It also offers practical guidance on how central banks should evaluate stablecoin issuance and settlement on Ethereum versus alternative networks, with examples of how governments and institutions are already using Ethereum today.

2. Tokenization Can Change the World's Financial Architecture (IMF)— In this piece, the IMF highlights the potential benefits of faster settlement and programmable assets, while warning that policy choices will determine whether tokenized finance strengthens the financial system or creates new risks around fragmentation, liquidity, infrastructure, and oversight.

→ Want more? Visit Blockstories Library for a curated selection of 120+ reports on digital assets.

Acquisition talks: According to Blockstories’ information, CACEIS, the custodian bank of Crédit Agricole, is in exclusive negotiations to acquire Meria, a French crypto investment platform with 150,000 users and around €350 million in assets under management.

• A French crypto brand: Meria launched as Just Mining in 2017 before rebranding in 2022. The platform was co-founded by Owen Simonin, better known as Hasheur, France’s most popular crypto influencer, whose large following helped scale the business. Today, Meria holds a MiCA-CASP license and serves both retail and corporate clients, offering crypto brokerage alongside yield products built mainly around staking.

Why it matters: The talks are surfacing as major financial institutions increasingly pursue acquisitions to expand their digital asset offerings. Just a few weeks ago, Standard Chartered acquired Zodia Custody to strengthen its custody business, underscoring how buying established platforms can help bring digital asset products to market faster than building the same capabilities in-house.

What CACEIS gets: That build-versus-buy logic points directly to Meria's staking business, which Blockstories understands is of particular interest to CACEIS as it prepares to launch its own crypto offering. The bank became the first French credit institution to obtain a MiCA-CASP license in June 2025. Owen Simonin's brand recognition is also said to be one of the key motivations behind the planned acquisition.

• Not the first target: Several sources also told Blockstories that Meria is not the first company CACEIS has sought to acquire. “They have been looking for a long time and have already approached a few other players,” said an executive at one of the companies previously approached.

Expanding the footprint: Beyond what an acquisition would add, CACEIS is already operating in digital assets. Since April 2026, the bank has served as the regulated custodian for the Amundi Bitcoin ETN, the first product of its kind approved by France's financial regulator and listed on Euronext Paris. In November, it also launched tokenized euro money market fund units on Ethereum, followed by two additional tokenized funds for Chinese financial group Ant International.

Inside Crédit Agricole’s wider push: Integrating Meria would also fit into a broader group strategy spanning stablecoins and tokenization. Yesterday, Crédit Agricole officially launched its euro stablecoin, EURXT, issued on CACEIS' balance sheet, as previously revealed by Blockstories. The group has also joined FARO, a dollar-side banking initiative alongside Citigroup, Bank of America, and UBS.

Outlook: The Meria deal is not done yet. Both parties have yet to sign a definitive agreement, and any transaction remains subject to regulatory approval. Should it close, it would position Crédit Agricole among Europe’s most active banking groups in digital assets, operating across custody, brokerage, stablecoin issuance, and tokenized funds.

Ask why institutional tokenization hasn't taken off, and the cash leg is one of the barriers that come up most. You can tokenize the bond, the fund, the commercial paper, but if the money still has to crawl through a bank on the other side, you've digitized half a trade.

The last few days suggest Europe is starting to move on it:

• On June 25, Euroclear and Société Générale-FORGE said they'd test settling tokenized dollar commercial paper in SG-FORGE's USD stablecoin.

• On Tuesday, French tokenization startup Spiko went live at the fund level: its euro and dollar money market funds now take subscriptions and redemptions directly in EURC and USDC, the first UCITS funds in Europe to do so.

• And yesterday, Crédit Agricole launched its own euro stablecoin, EURXT, and used it to settle a subscription into a tokenized Amundi money market fund.

Funnily, all three involve French players, and as it happens, we hosted our Paris Summit yesterday. At the event, onchain treasury built on stablecoins and tokenized money market funds was among the most discussed topics. Now all three news items point toward that same future.

And as far as one of France's largest banking groups goes, Crédit Agricole isn't just minting a stablecoin. As we reveal in today's top story, its custody arm CACEIS is in exclusive talks to buy one of France's best-known crypto platforms. More on that below.

Yes, you can call today’s newsletter the France Briefing.

• UK moves ahead with final crypto and stablecoin rules

• Exclusive: CACEIS in talks to acquire crypto investment platform Meria

Exclusive: CACEIS in Talks to Acquire Crypto Investment Platform Meria

Acquisition talks: According to Blockstories’ information, CACEIS, the custodian bank of Crédit Agricole, is in exclusive negotiations to acquire Meria, a French crypto investment platform with 150,000 users and around €350 million in assets under management.

• A French crypto brand: Meria launched as Just Mining in 2017 before rebranding in 2022. The platform was co-founded by Owen Simonin, better known as Hasheur, France’s most popular crypto influencer, whose large following helped scale the business. Today, Meria holds a MiCA-CASP license and serves both retail and corporate clients, offering crypto brokerage alongside yield products built mainly around staking.

Why it matters: The talks are surfacing as major financial institutions increasingly pursue acquisitions to expand their digital asset offerings. Just a few weeks ago, Standard Chartered acquired Zodia Custody to strengthen its custody business, underscoring how buying established platforms can help bring digital asset products to market faster than building the same capabilities in-house.

What CACEIS gets: That build-versus-buy logic points directly to Meria's staking business, which Blockstories understands is of particular interest to CACEIS as it prepares to launch its own crypto offering. The bank became the first French credit institution to obtain a MiCA-CASP license in June 2025. Owen Simonin's brand recognition is also said to be one of the key motivations behind the planned acquisition.

• Not the first target: Several sources also told Blockstories that Meria is not the first company CACEIS has sought to acquire. “They have been looking for a long time and have already approached a few other players,” said an executive at one of the companies previously approached.

Expanding the footprint: Beyond what an acquisition would add, CACEIS is already operating in digital assets. Since April 2026, the bank has served as the regulated custodian for the Amundi Bitcoin ETN, the first product of its kind approved by France's financial regulator and listed on Euronext Paris. In November, it also launched tokenized euro money market fund units on Ethereum, followed by two additional tokenized funds for Chinese financial group Ant International.

Inside Crédit Agricole’s wider push: Integrating Meria would also fit into a broader group strategy spanning stablecoins and tokenization. Yesterday, Crédit Agricole officially launched its euro stablecoin, EURXT, issued on CACEIS' balance sheet, as previously revealed by Blockstories. The group has also joined FARO, a dollar-side banking initiative alongside Citigroup, Bank of America, and UBS.

Outlook: The Meria deal is not done yet. Both parties have yet to sign a definitive agreement, and any transaction remains subject to regulatory approval. Should it close, it would position Crédit Agricole among Europe’s most active banking groups in digital assets, operating across custody, brokerage, stablecoin issuance, and tokenized funds.

Join us on July 7 for a 60-minute webinar on three of the hottest buzzwords of the past twelve months:

• Onchain vaults

• Tokenized funds

• Hyperliquid

Three category leaders — Steakhouse Financial, Apex Group, and Bitwise — each take one, breaking it down through their own playbook and a real case study. Ten minutes per session, followed by live Q&A. Over 200 professionals have already signed up.

>> Register here.

1. Anchoring Trust in Money: Innovation Beyond Stablecoins (BIS) — This special chapter from the BIS Annual Economic Report 2026 looks at what stablecoins get right and where they fall short, arguing that while they point to a future of faster, programmable payments, that future should be built around trusted forms of public and private money rather than private stablecoins alone.

2. Digital Wallets: A New Paradigm (World Bank) — The report elaborates on how digital wallets could change the way people prove identity, share data, sign documents, and make payments, and why they could become the central interface for accessing public and private digital services.

3. How Local Stablecoins Trade (Keyrock & Bitso Business) — The paper follows the journey of local stablecoins from centralized exchanges to onchain markets, showing how non-USD stablecoins are gaining traction across the digital asset ecosystem.

→ Want more? Visit Blockstories Library for a curated selection of 120+ reports on digital assets.

Private market tokenization: Last week, Citigroup unveiled a new service to tokenize Digital Depositary Receipts (DRs) for private shares, with a listing on SIX’s permissioned blockchain network. The first transaction involved a Citi portfolio company and Kaleido, a tokenization platform that works with SWIFT, HSBC, and the BIS.

• Why it matters: The product lands as the supply of investable private equity continues to grow. US IPO activity has slowed sharply since 2021: an average of about 64 US companies went public per year between 2022 and 2025, roughly a third of the 181-per-year average from 2018 to 2021. The result is a deep pool of private equity that institutions cannot easily reach through public markets, the gap that Citi’s receipts target.

Beyond fund wrappers: Tokenization of private company shares has so far taken two main shapes. Fintech platforms like Robinhood and Kraken’s xStocks have launched tokens tracking pre-IPO names like SpaceX and OpenAI, often through synthetic structures and without the companies’ cooperation. On the institutional side, tokenization platform Securitize has built a dominant position by wrapping fund interests from managers including Apollo, Hamilton Lane, and KKR into tokenized feeder funds. Citi’s receipt-based structure marks a third path, allowing direct, bank-issued exposure to underlying private shares issued onchain.

• “With smart contracts, you can permission access programmatically, implement lock-ups and compliance features. These characteristics of private assets that should remain by design are perfectly suited for DLT,” Cyrill Blöchlinger, Senior Business Development Manager at SIX, told Blockstories.

Good frictions, bad frictions: The receipt structure preserves more than just the technical features built into smart contracts. Confidentiality on pricing, controlled access to shareholders, and the absence of a public secondary market all stay. What gets removed is operational friction: paper-based processes, fragmentation, and the lack of standardization.

• “In private markets, some friction is a feature, not a bug. The opportunity is to remove the friction that adds no value,” Blöchlinger added.

Non-U.S. only, for now: Beyond what gets preserved and what gets removed, the product also carries a hard regulatory constraint. Only non-U.S. wealth and institutional investors are currently eligible, in line with how the securities are structured under Swiss law. Citi has signaled a longer-term ambition to extend access to U.S. investors, but that depends on a different regulatory setup.

The liquidity question: A further consequence of those design choices is that tokenization itself does not create liquidity that wasn’t there. SIX does not run a matching engine for these securities and does not publish a reference price; trades happen OTC, with buyers either approaching existing holders or going through Citi to source.

• “What you cannot do with tokenization, or with any technology, is create liquidity out of nothing. What you can do is make it more seamless and standardized to get access to private assets, remove friction, and that, in return, may increase the liquidity,” Blöchlinger noted.

Outlook: That increase, if it comes, will be incremental. Citi has signaled that its ambition is for the service to extend beyond its current footprint over time, both to other banks and to blockchain networks beyond SIX’s permissioned chain. The bank’s own 2030 forecast points to relatively slow growth in the category: it estimates the addressable private equity market at $12 trillion, but expects only around $100 billion to be tokenized in its base-case scenario, compared with $3.6 trillion in tokenized public equities.

“The Innovator’s Dilemma” is a business-school classic, and for years the question was how it would play out for CSDs once tokenization arrived. The last few months suggest a different plot than Christensen wrote.

Last week, Clearstream, Deutsche Börse’s post-trade arm, unveiled a “digital-first, fully hybrid” platform for traditional and tokenized securities.

Most of the parts already had their own press releases: D7, D7 DLT, MiCA crypto custody, the Circle stablecoin partnership. What’s new is that Clearstream now markets them as one holistic infrastructure, covering the full lifecycle from issuance and custody through settlement, asset servicing and collateral reuse.

So, less a debut than a consolidation. But the scale is the story. Clearstream already holds €22 trillion in assets under custody, and the ambition is to drag that mountain onchain, without making clients give up the systems they already run.

We asked Thilo Derenbach, who runs digital securities services at Clearstream, what that means in practice. A few things stood out:

• Clearstream wants to enlarge its collateral pool to include both securities and crypto assets, then make that collateral usable across traditional and onchain venues.

• The token is supposed to represent the actual security. Clearstream says its tokenized securities should carry dividends, voting and corporate actions, rather than behave like today’s synthetic “tokenized stock” wrappers.

• Clients will need a place to hold and manage them. Clearstream is building its own wallet so institutions can manage tokenized securities inside its infrastructure.

• Clearstream is going private-permissioned-chain first, using a Besu setup developed from the ECB’s CBDC trials. Public-chain access is the direction of travel, while interoperability with Euroclear and DTCC is being worked on at the standards level.

That last name should ring a bell, because Clearstream isn’t the only incumbent heading for production.

In the US, DTCC, whose depository holds more than $114 trillion in custody, is starting its own tokenization rollout next month, with suspiciously familiar talking points. “We’ve managed things in a ledger for 55 years,” its digital assets head Nadine Chakar told us in May. “Now we move to many more ledgers.”

The bet on both sides of the Atlantic is the same: tokenization won’t arrive as crypto rails replacing the incumbents. They’ll keep doing the one thing they’ve always done: holding the record of who owns what, just on more ledgers.

• Amundi, CACEIS, and Ant International partner on tokenized products

• Citi rolls out tokenization service for private company shares

Citigroup Rolls Out Tokenization Service for Private Company Shares

Private market tokenization: Last week, Citigroup unveiled a new service to tokenize Digital Depositary Receipts (DRs) for private shares, with a listing on SIX’s permissioned blockchain network. The first transaction involved a Citi portfolio company and Kaleido, a tokenization platform that works with SWIFT, HSBC, and the BIS.

• Why it matters: The product lands as the supply of investable private equity continues to grow. US IPO activity has slowed sharply since 2021: an average of about 64 US companies went public per year between 2022 and 2025, roughly a third of the 181-per-year average from 2018 to 2021. The result is a deep pool of private equity that institutions cannot easily reach through public markets, the gap that Citi’s receipts target.

Beyond fund wrappers: Tokenization of private company shares has so far taken two main shapes. Fintech platforms like Robinhood and Kraken’s xStocks have launched tokens tracking pre-IPO names like SpaceX and OpenAI, often through synthetic structures and without the companies’ cooperation. On the institutional side, tokenization platform Securitize has built a dominant position by wrapping fund interests from managers including Apollo, Hamilton Lane, and KKR into tokenized feeder funds. Citi’s receipt-based structure marks a third path, allowing direct, bank-issued exposure to underlying private shares issued onchain.

• “With smart contracts, you can permission access programmatically, implement lock-ups and compliance features. These characteristics of private assets that should remain by design are perfectly suited for DLT,” Cyrill Blöchlinger, Senior Business Development Manager at SIX, told Blockstories.

Good frictions, bad frictions: The receipt structure preserves more than just the technical features built into smart contracts. Confidentiality on pricing, controlled access to shareholders, and the absence of a public secondary market all stay. What gets removed is operational friction: paper-based processes, fragmentation, and the lack of standardization.

• “In private markets, some friction is a feature, not a bug. The opportunity is to remove the friction that adds no value,” Blöchlinger added.

Non-U.S. only, for now: Beyond what gets preserved and what gets removed, the product also carries a hard regulatory constraint. Only non-U.S. wealth and institutional investors are currently eligible, in line with how the securities are structured under Swiss law. Citi has signaled a longer-term ambition to extend access to U.S. investors, but that depends on a different regulatory setup.

The liquidity question: A further consequence of those design choices is that tokenization itself does not create liquidity that wasn’t there. SIX does not run a matching engine for these securities and does not publish a reference price; trades happen OTC, with buyers either approaching existing holders or going through Citi to source.

• “What you cannot do with tokenization, or with any technology, is create liquidity out of nothing. What you can do is make it more seamless and standardized to get access to private assets, remove friction, and that, in return, may increase the liquidity,” Blöchlinger noted.

Outlook: That increase, if it comes, will be incremental. Citi has signaled that its ambition is for the service to extend beyond its current footprint over time, both to other banks and to blockchain networks beyond SIX’s permissioned chain. The bank’s own 2030 forecast points to relatively slow growth in the category: it estimates the addressable private equity market at $12 trillion, but expects only around $100 billion to be tokenized in its base-case scenario, compared with $3.6 trillion in tokenized public equities.

1. The State of the European Crypto Market (Kaiko & Bitvavo) — The report examines how MiCA-driven regulatory certainty, exchange competition, and improving liquidity have fueled record EUR-denominated trading volumes, accelerated adoption of euro stablecoins, and helped EUR markets reach liquidity levels comparable to their USD counterparts.

2. The Anatomy of Stablecoin Transactions (BIS) — This paper challenges the common assumption that stablecoin transfers are synonymous with payments. It finds that they are primarily embedded in complex, programmable financial workflows, including trading, lending, liquidity provision, and settlement.

→ Want more? Visit Blockstories Library for a curated selection of 120+ reports on digital assets.

Project Eur.Bank: Last week, Italian payment network Bancomat announced that nine banks, including Intesa Sanpaolo, Banco BPM, and Crédit Agricole Italia, will begin internal testing of its euro stablecoin Eur.Bank in July. A public launch is targeted for late 2026 or early 2027, pending regulatory approval.

• Italy’s payment backbone: Owned by roughly 125 Italian banks, Bancomat operates the country’s largest domestic network for debit card payments, processing 2.7 billion transactions per year worth approximately €200 billion.

Why it matters: European banks are converging on stablecoins. Beyond single issuers such as SG-FORGE and ODDO BHF, Eur.Bank is going to be the second collective initiative after Qivalis, which is now 37 banks strong. What makes Bancomat distinct is its attempt to turn stablecoins into a scheme-based payment instrument, with shared rules, bank distribution, dispute mechanisms, and reserves that remain inside the banking system.

Details: To understand the strategy, we spoke with Emanuele Guzzoni, Senior Vice President of Blockchain Solutions at Bancomat. Here is what we learned from our conversation:

• Bringing payment schemes to stablecoins: Bancomat’s core proposition is to bring the card-payment rulebook to digital money. In cards, a double charge triggers a standardized dispute process between issuers and acquirers. Stablecoin payments lack comparable protections, and Bancomat sees that governance gap as the main barrier to everyday use.

  • “Stablecoins already offer efficient settlement; what networks like Bancomat add are the rules, protections, and trust that consumers expect from everyday payment instruments, such as standardized acceptance, dispute resolution mechanisms, and consumer safeguards,” Guzzoni told Blockstories.

• One issuer, no new consortium: The first token under the scheme will be issued by Flowpay, an open-banking fintech Bancomat acquired last August, while the banks act as distributors. There is no separate consortium either: decisions run through Bancomat’s existing governance with its shareholder banks, and any shareholder or client bank can join through standard onboarding.

• Reserves in cash, held by the banks: The reserves will sit entirely in cash, custodied pro rata across the distributing banks: a bank that distributes €20 million of the token holds €20 million of reserves, with an algorithm aligning custody balances with minting and burning. Bancomat monitors the accounts at scheme level. Qivalis, by contrast, plans to concentrate custody with a selected subset of custodian banks.

  • “The objective is not to maximize returns on the reserves. Should there be any change in reserve management policy, Flowpay would be required to inform the participating banks and secure their approval,” Guzzoni told Blockstories.

• Public chain, no bridges: The token will launch on a public blockchain rather than a permissioned bank network. Additional chains would follow via native burn-and-mint issuance rather than bridges. As brand owner, Bancomat keeps final say on chain and exchange listings.

  • “While I cannot disclose the specific network at this stage, it will be part of the Ethereum ecosystem and will definitely be a public blockchain,” Guzzoni told Blockstories.

Outlook: The July tests will run in a closed loop, restricted to bank employees, covering minting, redemption, transfers, and reserve management. But Bancomat does not plan to stop at a single token or a single market. Its scheme is built as an open framework, willing to welcome other euro stablecoins, while tokenized deposits sit among the next assets it wants the framework to support. The architecture is also designed to travel beyond Italy:

• "We want to scale this to other countries, not necessarily on Bancomat's own infrastructure, but through partnerships and local schemes that interoperate, the way we already do in the payments industry. The goal is to help the European banking ecosystem work together and play a larger role in digital assets," Guzzoni told Blockstories.

Wall Street has made its peace with digital money. Now it’s laying the pipes.

Last week, 17 of America’s largest banks, including JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, announced they are building a shared blockchain for tokenized deposits. The Clearing House will run it, with launch targeted for the first half of 2027.

The network is meant to solve the biggest challenge with tokenized deposits. Each one is a claim on one specific bank. And JPMorgan doesn't want Citi coins on its balance sheet, just as Citi doesn't want JPMorgan's.

To understand how the new network tries to solve this, we called Sal Karakaplan, Chief Strategy Officer at The Clearing House. The short version:

• “Our onchain solution clears and settles each bank’s tokenized deposits in close proximity with our fiat rails for wire, CHIPS, and instant payments, RTP. The token is burned on one side and minted on the other, and then the money moves via the fiat rails very quickly and efficiently.”

The rails he’s referring to already clear and settle more than $2 trillion a day. The new chain will plug straight into them.

It won’t be the only tokenized deposit network on the market, either. In March, we covered the Cari Network, a similar effort initially built around five regional U.S. banks.

Is there a pattern, you ask? Yeah, maybe: First, banks started issuing their own digital dollars. Now, groups of banks are building networks to connect them. Give it a year, and the debate will be how to connect the networks.

P.S.: On Tuesday, we’ll be hosting a 60-minute webinar on stablecoin use cases for banks. 200+ people already signed up. Register here if you want to talk all things onchain treasury management and more.

• Digital Asset raises $355 million to scale Canton Network

• Inside Bancomat’s new stablecoin initiative

Inside Eur.Bank: How Bancomat Brings Card-Scheme Rules to Stablecoins

Project Eur.Bank: Last week, Italian payment network Bancomat announced that nine banks, including Intesa Sanpaolo, Banco BPM, and Crédit Agricole Italia, will begin internal testing of its euro stablecoin Eur.Bank in July. A public launch is targeted for late 2026 or early 2027, pending regulatory approval.

• Italy’s payment backbone: Owned by roughly 125 Italian banks, Bancomat operates the country’s largest domestic network for debit card payments, processing 2.7 billion transactions per year worth approximately €200 billion.

Why it matters: European banks are converging on stablecoins. Beyond single issuers such as SG-FORGE and ODDO BHF, Eur.Bank is going to be the second collective initiative after Qivalis, which is now 37 banks strong. What makes Bancomat distinct is its attempt to turn stablecoins into a scheme-based payment instrument, with shared rules, bank distribution, dispute mechanisms, and reserves that remain inside the banking system.

Details: To understand the strategy, we spoke with Emanuele Guzzoni, Senior Vice President of Blockchain Solutions at Bancomat. Here is what we learned from our conversation:

• Bringing payment schemes to stablecoins: Bancomat’s core proposition is to bring the card-payment rulebook to digital money. In cards, a double charge triggers a standardized dispute process between issuers and acquirers. Stablecoin payments lack comparable protections, and Bancomat sees that governance gap as the main barrier to everyday use.

  • “Stablecoins already offer efficient settlement; what networks like Bancomat add are the rules, protections, and trust that consumers expect from everyday payment instruments, such as standardized acceptance, dispute resolution mechanisms, and consumer safeguards,” Guzzoni told Blockstories.

• One issuer, no new consortium: The first token under the scheme will be issued by Flowpay, an open-banking fintech Bancomat acquired last August, while the banks act as distributors. There is no separate consortium either: decisions run through Bancomat’s existing governance with its shareholder banks, and any shareholder or client bank can join through standard onboarding.

• Reserves in cash, held by the banks: The reserves will sit entirely in cash, custodied pro rata across the distributing banks: a bank that distributes €20 million of the token holds €20 million of reserves, with an algorithm aligning custody balances with minting and burning. Bancomat monitors the accounts at scheme level. Qivalis, by contrast, plans to concentrate custody with a selected subset of custodian banks.

  • “The objective is not to maximize returns on the reserves. Should there be any change in reserve management policy, Flowpay would be required to inform the participating banks and secure their approval,” Guzzoni told Blockstories.

• Public chain, no bridges: The token will launch on a public blockchain rather than a permissioned bank network. Additional chains would follow via native burn-and-mint issuance rather than bridges. As brand owner, Bancomat keeps final say on chain and exchange listings.

  • “While I cannot disclose the specific network at this stage, it will be part of the Ethereum ecosystem and will definitely be a public blockchain,” Guzzoni told Blockstories.

Outlook: The July tests will run in a closed loop, restricted to bank employees, covering minting, redemption, transfers, and reserve management. But Bancomat does not plan to stop at a single token or a single market. Its scheme is built as an open framework, willing to welcome other euro stablecoins, while tokenized deposits sit among the next assets it wants the framework to support. The architecture is also designed to travel beyond Italy:

• "We want to scale this to other countries, not necessarily on Bancomat's own infrastructure, but through partnerships and local schemes that interoperate, the way we already do in the payments industry. The goal is to help the European banking ecosystem work together and play a larger role in digital assets," Guzzoni told Blockstories.

Webinar: Winning with Stablecoins: Banking Use Cases & The Infra-Stack Required

European banks are rushing towards stablecoins. However, most of them are still figuring out which use cases to prioritize and what infrastructure to build.

On June 16, leaders from Visa, BitGo, Digital Asset, and LayerZero will share some insights into how their clients are approaching these questions.

→ 200+ people have already signed up. Secure your spot here.

1. Three Competing Models for Onchain Finance (Deutsche Bank) — Deutsche Bank argues that stablecoins will likely dominate public blockchain payments, tokenized deposits will extend commercial bank money into programmable environments, and wholesale CBDCs could provide the neutral settlement asset needed for tokenized markets and cross-border finance.

2. Digital Assets Enter the Banking Core (BCG & Anchorage Digital) — As stablecoins, tokenized deposits, tokenized funds, and crypto services are increasingly becoming part of mainstream banking infrastructure, this report outlines how institutions can position themselves before adoption reaches scale.

→ Want more? Visit Blockstories Library for a curated selection of 120+ reports on digital assets.

Acquisition spree: Last Tuesday, digital asset data and infrastructure firm Kaiko announced the acquisition of Amberdata, a leading U.S.-based data provider. The deal came just two weeks after Kaiko acquired Cometh, a MiCA/CASP-licensed European DeFi infrastructure provider.

• Why it matters: The acquisitions expand Kaiko’s geographic footprint and deepen its technical capabilities, but in different ways. Amberdata gives Kaiko a major foothold in the U.S., brings its combined client base to more than 260 institutional clients, and strengthens its market data, derivatives analytics, onchain data, and market intelligence offering. Cometh, by contrast, was already a technology partner to Kaiko, but the acquisition brings its smart-contract engineering, onchain execution capabilities, and MiCA-regulated infrastructure fully in-house.

Business expansion: Together, the deals help Kaiko move beyond the crypto market data products that have historically defined its offering. Founded in 2014, Kaiko first built its business around collecting and structuring crypto market data for traders, banks, asset managers, brokers, and regulators. It later expanded into indices and benchmark-regulated pricing for ETFs, ETPs, derivatives, and other financial products, a segment where the company says it works with a majority of European ETP issuers.

Next frontier: More recently, driven by the growth of tokenized assets and institutional participation in onchain markets, Kaiko has been building out a third pillar around data infrastructure. The goal is to bring traditional financial data onchain and extract blockchain data back into institutional systems, targeting a market Kaiko views as significantly larger than the market for crypto-native asset data.

• “We started by building infrastructure and expertise around crypto market data. That foundation now positions us to expand into tokenized assets, where the opportunity is significantly larger. While the crypto market represents roughly $2-3 trillion today, the addressable market for tokenized traditional assets is expected to exceed $200 trillion,” Elodie de Marchi-Chouard, Kaiko’s Chief Operating Officer, told Blockstories.

Market validation: Early signs of this transition have emerged throughout the year. In February, Kaiko partnered with Bloomberg to make licensed financial data directly accessible onchain, while preserving entitlement checks, licensing, and compliance.

From feeds to assets: A similar announcement followed in March, when Kaiko collaborated with S&P Dow Jones Indices to bring the iBoxx U.S. Treasuries Index onchain. Unlike a traditional index feed distributed through a platform, the index was tokenized as a native digital asset, allowing licensed product issuers to access benchmark data directly through the token, with distribution, licensing, and permissioning embedded into the asset itself. According to Kaiko, this points to a broader shift in how financial data will be distributed and consumed in tokenized markets.

• "With tokenization, data is no longer accessed solely through platforms but can be embedded directly into a token, as with tokenized indices, or delivered directly onchain, as Bloomberg is now doing via Kaiko, which requires technical capabilities that Cometh brings to us," added de Marchi-Chouard.

Europe’s largest consortium: Two weeks after Blockstories exclusively broke the news that 25 new banks were set to join the European stablecoin consortium Qivalis, the formal announcement followed last week. With that, the consortium now officially counts 37 member banks, including some of Europe’s largest institutions, such as BNP Paribas, UniCredit, DZ Bank, and BBVA.

• Why it matters: Together, Qivalis member banks now span 15 countries, hold roughly €8-10 trillion in customer deposits, and serve a combined customer base of around 450-500 million. Compared with single-bank issuers such as ODDO BHF, Banking Circle, and Société Générale, this gives Qivalis a significant distribution advantage for its stablecoin, which is slated to go live in H2 2026.

Qivalis: Current Members

Industry perspectives: To better understand how Qivalis’ scale, institutional backing, and potential distribution advantage are viewed across the European banking and stablecoin landscape, we spoke with:

1. ABN AMRO, a newly joined Qivalis member, on why it decided to join the consortium during this second wave of additions.

2. ODDO BHF, a bank pursuing the single-issuer route, on the trade-offs of the consortium model.

3. AllUnity, a European non-bank stablecoin issuer, on why it does not yet view Qivalis as a direct competitor.

Italy's first bank under MiCA: Last week, Banca Sella became the first credit institution to receive a MiCA-CASP authorization from the Bank of Italy. The license allows the bank to provide crypto-asset custody and transfer services, putting it in position to launch a regulated crypto offering for its clients later this year.

• Why it matters: Italy's MiCA rollout has been one of the slowest in the bloc. Only one entity, the fintech firm CheckSig, had previously been licensed under the framework, while Germany already counts 55 licensed entities, the Netherlands 26, and France 19.

A fintech-leaning bank: That makes Banca Sella's first move all the more notable given its profile. One of Italy's most fintech-forward banks, it manages around €50 billion in assets and serves 3.1 million customers, with a client base concentrated among entrepreneurs, SMEs, and fintech companies. That positioning has shaped its approach to digital assets, which the bank has been building deliberately since 2022.

• "We started our journey in the digital asset space in 2022, with the establishment of a dedicated competence center focused on DLT and digital assets. Over the past few years, we have invested in experimentation, internal education, and the development of concrete initiatives, reaching what we believe is now a more mature phase for the market," explained Andrea Tessera, Managing Director of Digital Banking at Banca Sella, to Blockstories.

Already invested in the space: That early start has placed Banca Sella inside several of the most closely watched Italian digital asset initiatives. The bank is among the founding members of Qivalis, the European bank-led euro stablecoin consortium, and is also participating in Eur.Bank, the stablecoin project led by Bancomat.

Why now: Banca Sella's MiCA-CASP license is the foundation it needed to actually launch crypto services. The bank had been observing growing client interest in digital assets for several years, according to Tessera, but until recently the broader market lacked regulated banks able to deliver such services within a supervised framework.

• "What clients were missing was the availability of regulated and trusted operators capable of offering these services, such as banks. The ongoing evolution of the European regulatory framework is helping to close that gap."

Beyond custody: Custody and crypto transfers are only the first step of Banca Sella's plans. While the bank's MiCA-CASP authorization currently limits it to these foundational services, Tessera signaled that the bank is already evaluating an expansion in line with the broader maturation of the digital asset space.

• "In the early stages, the crypto space was often predominantly associated with speculative activity. Today, we are seeing the emergence of more structural and long-term themes, such as tokenization, stablecoins, programmable assets, digital identity, and new models for value transfer," Tessera noted.

Outlook: The bank plans to launch its crypto offering later this year as it finalizes its operating model and defines its priority client segments.

• “We will be able to provide more detailed insights in the coming months, as the services move into the operational phase and client engagement progresses,” concluded Tessera.

If you thought Europe's banks would all line up behind one stablecoin consortium, you reckoned without the Italians.

On Wednesday, Bancomat, Italy's largest domestic payment network, said its euro stablecoin project, Eur.Bank, has entered testing. Over the coming months, nine member banks will run transactions among themselves to trial the system.

What's interesting is that with Intesa Sanpaolo, Banca Sella, and BPER Banca, the group features three members that also form part of Qivalis, the other euro stablecoin banking consortium.

Apparently, we're running open relationships in European consortium land.

One reason a bank might play both sides: the two consortia won't treat reserves the same way. Qivalis will keep them in segregated custody, ring-fenced 1:1 from the issuer. Bancomat wants them on the issuing bank's own balance sheet, so the money never leaves the system.

For now, Bancomat's operational details remain thin, and according to our sources, the regulatory work is still early.

What this leaves us with are two things:

1. Even in stablecoins, Europe finds a way to do it in pieces.

2. The experimentation in “stablecoins meet banking” is only just beginning.

• MoneyGram launches a U.S. dollar stablecoin

• Banca Sella becomes Italy’s first bank to receive a MiCA-CASP authorization

Banca Sella Becomes Italy’s First Bank to Receive a MiCA-CASP Authorization

Italy's first bank under MiCA: Last week, Banca Sella became the first credit institution to receive a MiCA-CASP authorization from the Bank of Italy. The license allows the bank to provide crypto-asset custody and transfer services, putting it in position to launch a regulated crypto offering for its clients later this year.

• Why it matters: Italy's MiCA rollout has been one of the slowest in the bloc. Only one entity, the fintech firm CheckSig, had previously been licensed under the framework, while Germany already counts 55 licensed entities, the Netherlands 26, and France 19.

A fintech-leaning bank: That makes Banca Sella's first move all the more notable given its profile. One of Italy's most fintech-forward banks, it manages around €50 billion in assets and serves 3.1 million customers, with a client base concentrated among entrepreneurs, SMEs, and fintech companies. That positioning has shaped its approach to digital assets, which the bank has been building deliberately since 2022.

• "We started our journey in the digital asset space in 2022, with the establishment of a dedicated competence center focused on DLT and digital assets. Over the past few years, we have invested in experimentation, internal education, and the development of concrete initiatives, reaching what we believe is now a more mature phase for the market," explained Andrea Tessera, Managing Director of Digital Banking at Banca Sella, to Blockstories.

Already invested in the space: That early start has placed Banca Sella inside several of the most closely watched Italian digital asset initiatives. The bank is among the founding members of Qivalis, the European bank-led euro stablecoin consortium, and is also participating in Eur.Bank, the stablecoin project led by Bancomat.

Why now: Banca Sella's MiCA-CASP license is the foundation it needed to actually launch crypto services. The bank had been observing growing client interest in digital assets for several years, according to Tessera, but until recently the broader market lacked regulated banks able to deliver such services within a supervised framework.

• "What clients were missing was the availability of regulated and trusted operators capable of offering these services, such as banks. The ongoing evolution of the European regulatory framework is helping to close that gap."

Beyond custody: Custody and crypto transfers are only the first step of Banca Sella's plans. While the bank's MiCA-CASP authorization currently limits it to these foundational services, Tessera signaled that the bank is already evaluating an expansion in line with the broader maturation of the digital asset space.

• "In the early stages, the crypto space was often predominantly associated with speculative activity. Today, we are seeing the emergence of more structural and long-term themes, such as tokenization, stablecoins, programmable assets, digital identity, and new models for value transfer," Tessera noted.

Outlook: The bank plans to launch its crypto offering later this year as it finalizes its operating model and defines its priority client segments.

• “We will be able to provide more detailed insights in the coming months, as the services move into the operational phase and client engagement progresses,” concluded Tessera.

Institutional interest in onchain lending is rising, but actual participation remains limited, with institutions accounting for only ~6-10% of outstanding onchain loans.

In our latest field report, we map the institutional crypto lending stack and break down why institutions are slowly moving onchain, what barriers still limit broader adoption, and what infrastructure is being built to support the market’s next phase of growth.

>> Access the report

1. Digital Assets Primer: How Vaults Can Shape The Capital Markets Of Tomorrow (S&P Global Ratings) — This report takes a look at how onchain vaults could become a new building block for capital markets. It explains how vaults pool assets, automate investment strategies, and eventually support use cases ranging from credit and liquidity management to structured products.

2. Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain (Citi) — Citi argues that public equities, treasuries, and tokenized cash will likely drive the next wave of tokenization. The report also provides concrete figures, projecting that tokenized assets could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030 as market infrastructure and regulation start to catch up.

→ Want more? Visit Blockstories Library for a curated selection of 120+ reports on digital assets.

Webinar: Winning with Stablecoins: Banking Use Cases & The Infra-Stack Required

European banks are rushing towards stablecoins. However, most of them are still figuring out which use cases to prioritize and what infrastructure to build.

On June 16, we’re coming up with answers. We partnered up with four leading infrastructure providers who showcase concrete case studies around use cases like corporate treasury management and stablecoin settlement.

Register now.

SoFi just became the first nationally chartered US bank to hand a stablecoin to its entire retail base.

Nearly 15 million members can now buy, hold, and move SoFiUSD from the same app they use to refinance their student loans. It’s live on Ethereum and Solana, redeemable 1:1 from SoFi Bank, backed primarily by cash at the Fed. As far as bank-issued stablecoins go, the structure is about as clean as it gets.

But the stablecoin is only half the design.

In the coming weeks, SoFi plans to launch a tokenized deposit alongside it, and the interplay between the two is where this gets interesting.

Two passports for the same dollar. The stablecoin is built to leave: it travels anywhere onchain, 24/7, to any wallet or exchange, with no interest and no FDIC insurance. The tokenized deposit is built to stay: it earns interest, carries deposit insurance, and never leaves SoFi.

Most banks have treated this as a fork in the road: one or the other. SoFi treats it as a toggle, and lets the customer pick the dollar they need at any given moment.

It’s a model likely to set a precedent, especially in Europe, where tokenized deposit experiments have run furthest and bank stablecoin adoption is only accelerating (see today’s top story).

So, checkmark on the architecture. The harder chapter comes next: giving members a reason to send the dollar that leaves, rather than keep the one that pays.

• Banca Sella becomes the first Italian bank to obtain a MiCA-CASP authorization

• Qivalis: To what extent could it reshape the euro stablecoin market?

Qivalis Momentum: To What Extent Could It Reshape the Euro Stablecoin Market?

Europe’s largest consortium: Two weeks after Blockstories exclusively broke the news that 25 new banks were set to join the European stablecoin consortium Qivalis, the formal announcement followed last week. With that, the consortium now officially counts 37 member banks, including some of Europe’s largest institutions, such as BNP Paribas, UniCredit, DZ Bank, and BBVA.

• Why it matters: Together, Qivalis member banks now span 15 countries, hold roughly €8-10 trillion in customer deposits, and serve a combined customer base of around 450-500 million. Compared with single-bank issuers such as ODDO BHF, Banking Circle, and Société Générale, this gives Qivalis a significant distribution advantage for its stablecoin, which is slated to go live in H2 2026.

Qivalis: Current Members

Industry perspectives: To better understand how Qivalis’ scale, institutional backing, and potential distribution advantage are viewed across the European banking and stablecoin landscape, we spoke with:

1. ABN AMRO, a newly joined Qivalis member, on why it decided to join the consortium during this second wave of additions.

2. ODDO BHF, a bank pursuing the single-issuer route, on the trade-offs of the consortium model.

3. AllUnity, a European non-bank stablecoin issuer, on why it does not yet view Qivalis as a direct competitor.

Following a great kickoff event in Madrid last week, the Blockstories Horizon 2026 Summer Series continues with our Money 20/20 Summit in Amsterdam on June 1, before heading to Paris on July 1.

Join us and our partners from Visa, Bitwise, Steakhouse Financial, ABN AMRO and others for exclusive evening events exploring the top trends in digital assets over the next 12 to 18 months.

>> Join us in Amsterdam on June 1
>> Join us in Paris on July 1

Led by a progressive banking sector and a fast-growing tokenization ecosystem, Spain has become one of Europe’s most interesting digital asset markets.

In our latest research report, we map the Spanish ecosystem and break down the five characteristics that make the market unique and well-positioned for its next phase of growth.

>> Access the report

1. Digital Assets & the Future of Wholesale Banking (Morgan Stanley & Oliver Wyman) — As digital assets move from experimentation to deployment, Morgan Stanley and Oliver Wyman examine how tokenized rails could reshape wholesale banking economics. The paper argues that the biggest impact will not come from crypto as an asset class, but from the migration of payments, FX, collateral, liquidity management, and securities services onto tokenized infrastructure.

2. Stablecoins: Convergent Rules on the Surface, Divergent Regimes in Practice (ECRI) — This paper compares stablecoin regulatory frameworks across seven major jurisdictions, highlighting how seemingly similar rules can lead to very different outcomes in areas such as reserve requirements and the treatment of foreign-issued stablecoins.

→ Want more? Visit Blockstories Library for a curated selection of 120+ reports on digital assets.

Bank-owned custody: On Monday, Standard Chartered announced it will acquire Zodia Custody, the regulated digital asset custodian it had incubated since 2020 through its venture arm, SC Ventures. The custody business will be folded into the bank’s Financing and Securities Services division.

Why it matters: Digital asset custody is moving from the edge of banking into its core, with competition no longer confined to crypto-native firms like Coinbase, Ripple Custody, and BitGo. Standard Chartered is now putting itself at the center of that shift by strengthening its digital assets custody offering for its institutional clients, while other G-SIBs like Citigroup and Deutsche Bank are reportedly also building out their own.

• A maturing custody market: This wave of bank entries reflects how the demands of institutional clients have shifted. Cold storage is no longer the defining feature of digital asset custody. Instead, clients increasingly look for prime-services capabilities like lending, brokerage, collateralized financing, and off-exchange settlement, which players across the custody market are already racing to layer on top.

Already at the front: Standard Chartered enters this race from a strong starting position. In July 2025, it became the first G-SIB to launch institutional crypto spot trading, and the bank also operates a regulated HKD stablecoin initiative in Hong Kong and has developed tokenized deposit capabilities.

A six-year incubation: That position has been building since 2020, when SC Ventures set up Zodia Custody. Over the years that followed, Zodia built a client base that includes 21Shares and CoinShares and obtained regulatory status across five jurisdictions. Standard Chartered itself became the largest user of the platform, running its live digital asset custody business on Zodia's infrastructure across multiple markets.

What the acquisition enables: Bringing Zodia fully inside now consolidates that arrangement under the bank's direct ownership and significantly expands its existing digital asset custody offering both geographically and in product scope.

• “The acquisition allows Standard Chartered to expand the reach of its existing digital asset custody offering, both geographically and in terms of product capabilities. It opens up additional markets such as the UK, Australia, and ADGM, while also broadening what the bank can offer clients, from staking to collateral management and off-exchange settlement,” Anoosh Arevshatian, Chief Product Officer at Zodia Custody, told Blockstories.

Solutions stays separate: What Standard Chartered is not absorbing is Zodia's other business line, a white-label infrastructure platform that lets institutions build and operate their own digital asset services. It will be carved out into a new SC Ventures entity called Zodia Solutions, led by current Zodia Custody CEO Julian Sawyer. The structure keeps the regulated custody client business inside Standard Chartered, while making the underlying tech stack available to other financial institutions that want to launch digital asset services without assembling the full stack themselves.

• “Zodia Solutions is designed to expand access to bank-grade digital asset infrastructure for financial institutions. Custody, settlement through Interchange, staking, tokenization, and liquidity access are all available through a single integration, allowing institutions to scale digital asset services without having to assemble the entire stack internally,” Arevshatian added.

_____________

Three Views From Inside Other Institutions

Standard Chartered's path of bringing a digital asset custodian fully in-house is one of several structural choices banks are making.

To put the move in context, Blockstories asked three practitioners at other regulated banks how they have approached the three core questions: what to build versus buy, how to integrate it into existing banking infrastructure, and how to design it for more than one bank.

By publishing the world's first comprehensive crypto framework in 2023, the European Union had quite a head start in digital assets regulation. Three years later, the European Commission is now asking whether MiCA is still fit for purpose.

Yesterday, it launched a public consultation that covers a remarkably broad range of topics:

• MiCA’s regulatory perimeter, and whether the line between crypto-assets and financial instruments is still clear enough.

• Stablecoins, including reserves, redemption rights, global issuance models, and the ban on yield.

• CASPs and market access, including reverse solicitation, non-EU platforms, and multi-service business models.

• Topics MiCA barely touched the first time: staking, lending, DeFi, tokenized deposits, perpetuals, prediction markets.

• The legal foundations of tokenization, from ownership and transfer to custody, collateral, insolvency and conflicts of law.

The bottom line: We’re going for MiCA 2.0.

What’s interesting is the timing. This consultation comes well before the formal MiCA review due in 2027, suggesting the Commission is aware that the market and competitive landscape have moved quickly, not least because of developments in the U.S.

Feedback is due by 31 August.

• Qivalis officially confirms 25 new member banks

• Standard Chartered acquires Zodia Custody

Standard Chartered Acquires Zodia Custody to Bring Digital Asset Custody Fully In-House

Bank-owned custody: On Monday, Standard Chartered announced it will acquire Zodia Custody, the regulated digital asset custodian it had incubated since 2020 through its venture arm, SC Ventures. The custody business will be folded into the bank’s Financing and Securities Services division.

Why it matters: Digital asset custody is moving from the edge of banking into its core, with competition no longer confined to crypto-native firms like Coinbase, Ripple Custody, and BitGo. Standard Chartered is now putting itself at the center of that shift by strengthening its digital assets custody offering for its institutional clients, while other G-SIBs like Citigroup and Deutsche Bank are reportedly also building out their own.

• A maturing custody market: This wave of bank entries reflects how the demands of institutional clients have shifted. Cold storage is no longer the defining feature of digital asset custody. Instead, clients increasingly look for prime-services capabilities like lending, brokerage, collateralized financing, and off-exchange settlement, which players across the custody market are already racing to layer on top.

Already at the front: Standard Chartered enters this race from a strong starting position. In July 2025, it became the first G-SIB to launch institutional crypto spot trading, and the bank also operates a regulated HKD stablecoin initiative in Hong Kong and has developed tokenized deposit capabilities.

A six-year incubation: That position has been building since 2020, when SC Ventures set up Zodia Custody. Over the years that followed, Zodia built a client base that includes 21Shares and CoinShares and obtained regulatory status across five jurisdictions. Standard Chartered itself became the largest user of the platform, running its live digital asset custody business on Zodia's infrastructure across multiple markets.

What the acquisition enables: Bringing Zodia fully inside now consolidates that arrangement under the bank's direct ownership and significantly expands its existing digital asset custody offering both geographically and in product scope.

• “The acquisition allows Standard Chartered to expand the reach of its existing digital asset custody offering, both geographically and in terms of product capabilities. It opens up additional markets such as the UK, Australia, and ADGM, while also broadening what the bank can offer clients, from staking to collateral management and off-exchange settlement,” Anoosh Arevshatian, Chief Product Officer at Zodia Custody, told Blockstories.

Solutions stays separate: What Standard Chartered is not absorbing is Zodia's other business line, a white-label infrastructure platform that lets institutions build and operate their own digital asset services. It will be carved out into a new SC Ventures entity called Zodia Solutions, led by current Zodia Custody CEO Julian Sawyer. The structure keeps the regulated custody client business inside Standard Chartered, while making the underlying tech stack available to other financial institutions that want to launch digital asset services without assembling the full stack themselves.

• “Zodia Solutions is designed to expand access to bank-grade digital asset infrastructure for financial institutions. Custody, settlement through Interchange, staking, tokenization, and liquidity access are all available through a single integration, allowing institutions to scale digital asset services without having to assemble the entire stack internally,” Arevshatian added.

_____________

Three Views From Inside Other Institutions

Standard Chartered's path of bringing a digital asset custodian fully in-house is one of several structural choices banks are making.

To put the move in context, Blockstories asked three practitioners at other regulated banks how they have approached the three core questions: what to build versus buy, how to integrate it into existing banking infrastructure, and how to design it for more than one bank.

We just published a new research report on Spain’s digital asset ecosystem. In there, we identify the five characteristics defining Spain’s digital asset adoption, provide a snapshot of where the market stands today, and outline where it is likely headed next.

The print version will be presented today at our Madrid Summit. So, if you're in town, make sure to stop by.

>> Access the report

1. AI and Tokenization are poised to redefine the Efficient Frontier (Franklin Templeton) — Franklin Templeton's digital assets team argues that the combination of AI and tokenization could deliver a lasting improvement in portfolio efficiency, pointing to always-on investment processes, broader access to tokenized opportunity sets, and lower operational and settlement frictions as the main drivers.

2. The Future of Digital Assets (BCG) — This report sizes the three core digital asset domains, (crypto assets, stablecoins, and RWAs) and outlines four scenarios for where banks face the greatest revenue risks and where the largest opportunities may emerge across asset management, trading, and the client interface.

→ Want more? Visit the Blockstories Library for a curated selection of 120+ reports on digital assets.

U.S. expansion: Last week, Société Générale carried out its first issuance of a tokenized U.S. bond via its blockchain subsidiary SG-Forge. The move underscores the bank’s broader global push into asset tokenization, as well as its growing strategic focus on the U.S. market.

• “Our goal was to demonstrate that we have the capabilities and expertise to execute this type of transaction under U.S. law and reach a new market, while partnering with leading American players for this first issuance,” explained Jean-Marc Stenger, CEO of SG-Forge, to Blockstories.

Why it matters: SG-Forge has previously engaged in tokenization efforts in Europe, including a repo operation with the Banque de France and a refinancing transaction with MakerDAO. Now, the firm is extending its activity to the U.S., supported by the recent launch of its USD-stablecoin USDCV, which complements its euro stablecoin and currently has $27.5 million in circulation.

Local execution approach: To carry out the issuance in a U.S. regulatory context, SG-Forge partnered with established domestic players. The transaction was executed on the Canton Network, with DRW acting as the buyer and Broadridge providing infrastructure services.

• “Entering a market like this necessarily requires co-creating an ecosystem with local partners. It’s essential to envision broader tokenization of securities,” explained a source close to the bank.

A simple product to start: In order to align the product with existing U.S. investor familiarity and operational standards, SG-Forge deliberately selected a short-term floating-rate note for this first issuance.

• “It’s a standard and liquid financial instrument, making it easy for investors to understand and use,” explained Jean-Marc Stenger. “There have been very few natively tokenized debt issuances in the United States, which makes this operation all the more pioneering. It was essential to master these new forms of securities under U.S. law to be ready to meet growing client demand.”

A call from the CEO: It is also worth noting that the move aligns with priorities set by Slawomir Krupa, who became CEO of Société Générale in 2023 after previously leading the group’s Americas division.

• “If you want adoption, Société Générale needs the U.S.,” a source told us.

Production milestone: Last week, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) shared new details on the rollout of its tokenization service. Starting in July, DTCC plans to facilitate a first set of production trades, developed with input from a 50+ firm industry working group that includes JPMorgan, HSBC, Citi, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq, Ondo Finance, Circle and others.

Why it matters: DTCC sits at the center of U.S. capital markets. As the world’s largest and most systemically important central securities depository, it safeguards more than $114 trillion in assets and processes over $4.7 quadrillion in securities transactions each year. Its tokenization rollout lands amid broader momentum, with tokenized equities now above $1.4 billion and players like Nasdaq and ICE pushing deeper into the space.

Where DTCC fits: Unlike platforms focused on issuance, trading, or distribution, DTCC sits at the post-trade layer, where tokenization affects custody, clearing, settlement, and the official ownership record.

Green light by the SEC: Extending the ownership record into onchain representations required a specific regulatory green light. DTCC’s tokenization service is anchored in the SEC’s December 2025 no-action letter, which grants a three-year framework to operate a blockchain-based post-trade layer. Under that framework, DTCC issues tokenized entitlements: digital instruments that mirror the economic rights of an underlying asset while the security itself stays in traditional custody.

Same job, more ledgers: That structure reflects how DTCC sees the depository function evolving. Rather than tokenizing the underlying securities themselves, DTCC is extending the role it has performed for decades — maintaining a single record of who owns what — by issuing onchain representations that stay synchronized with that record.

• “Our job has always been to maintain the record of ownership in this market,” Nadine Chakar, Global Head of DTCC Digital Assets, told Blockstories. “We have managed things in a ledger for the past 55 years. Now we’re going to move forward to many more ledgers.”

How it works: The mechanics of that multi-ledger model run through ComposerX, the tokenization platform DTCC developed after acquiring fintech firm Securrency in 2023. The flow is essentially a two-way swap between a participant’s traditional and digital positions:

• A participant requests a conversion through a client interface or API. ComposerX issues a tokenized entitlement and deposits it into the wallet of the participant’s choice. The underlying security stays in DTCC’s traditional custody.

• The reverse works the same way: a participant can return a tokenized entitlement, which ComposerX burns, restoring the position to its traditional form. Each tokenized entitlement carries the same CUSIP as its traditional counterpart to avoid splitting liquidity between the two forms.

Multi-chain by design: Once a token is in a participant’s wallet, it can move across more than one blockchain. Canton Network was the first supported network, with others expected to follow.

• “Canton Network was our first network, and it won’t be the last. We hope to have additional ones ready by July. If not, they will be ready by October,” Chakar told Blockstories.

No bridges: Movement between those networks goes through a mint-and-burn model rather than bridging. Tokens can move into any registered wallet on any supported network, and participants are free to deploy them across DeFi, provided the token remains in a compliant state.

The netting question: The same conservative logic shapes how DTCC thinks about settlement. The infrastructure could technically support atomic settlement for delivery-versus-payment transactions, but DTCC argues this would dramatically increase funding needs for participants. Its current netting efficiency sits around 98%, meaning atomic settlement at scale would require liquidity the market is not yet structured to provide.

• “The technology supports atomic settlement, but the question is: should we?” Chakar said. “We’ve spent five decades ensuring that the markets are efficient, scalable, secure, and safe. The last thing we want to do is uproot all that.”

What’s next: Between July and October, the 50 participating institutions will test the service in live conditions, with DTCC gathering feedback on what works and what does not. In parallel, DTCC is preparing its Collateral AppChain, a shared infrastructure platform designed to support 24/7 collateral management across traditional markets and blockchains, integrating Chainlink for automated workflows around margining, optimization, and settlement. The launch is targeted for Q4 2026.