The UK government has brought together 54 financial and digital asset companies in a new taskforce designed to accelerate tokenization across the country’s wholesale capital markets. The group includes BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, UBS, Barclays, Coinbase, Circle, and Ripple, combining some of the world’s largest traditional financial institutions with major crypto infrastructure providers.
The initiative is led by Chris Woolard, HM Treasury’s Wholesale Digital Markets Champion and a former interim chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority. Backed by the City of London Corporation, the taskforce will spend the next 12 months developing live market applications rather than limiting its work to policy papers and experimental pilots.
The first priority will be tokenized repurchase agreements, commonly known as repo. These short-term funding transactions are central to institutional liquidity and collateral management, making them a practical starting point for testing whether distributed ledger technology can reduce settlement delays, operational costs, and dependence on fragmented legacy systems.
Tokenized Repo Becomes the First Major Test
Tokenized repo could allow collateral and cash to move more quickly between counterparties while improving transparency around ownership and settlement status. In conventional markets, repo transactions often depend on multiple intermediaries, separate ledgers, and limited operating hours. A shared digital infrastructure could support faster settlement and more efficient use of high-quality liquid assets.
However, technology alone will not determine whether the project succeeds. Tokenized securities must be capable of moving across different blockchain networks and connecting with regulated forms of money, including commercial bank deposits, tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and central bank settlement systems. The taskforce will therefore need to address interoperability, legal certainty, privacy, collateral eligibility, and operational resilience.
The UK also plans to advance its proposed digital government bond, known as DIGIT. A tokenized gilt could provide a sovereign-grade asset around which new digital capital markets infrastructure could develop. Market participants have argued that official debt issued on distributed ledger technology would give banks and investors a credible settlement and collateral instrument for wider tokenized activity.
Britain Competes for Digital Markets Leadership
The taskforce reflects growing competition among financial centers seeking to establish themselves as hubs for tokenized assets. The United States, European Union, Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates are all developing regulatory frameworks and market infrastructure for blockchain-based securities and settlement.
Woolard’s report estimates that faster adoption of digital financial markets could add as much as £33 billion to UK economic output and generate £14 billion in additional tax revenue by 2035. Boston Consulting Group has separately estimated that tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion globally by that year, far exceeding the present value of crypto assets and stablecoins.
Including firms such as Coinbase, Circle, and Ripple alongside global banks and asset managers indicates that the UK expects public blockchain technology and crypto-native infrastructure to play a role in institutional markets. Their participation may help connect traditional securities systems with stablecoins, tokenized deposits, custody platforms, and blockchain settlement networks.
The taskforce’s challenge will be turning broad institutional support into functioning market infrastructure. If the group can move tokenized repo and digital sovereign debt from trials into regular use, the UK could strengthen London’s role in the next generation of capital markets. Failure to move quickly, however, could allow liquidity, standards, and financial technology investment to shift toward competing jurisdictions.
