Banking and finance leaders gathered in Edinburgh for a ‘tokenisation’ summit – as the industry maps out the future for digital asset ownership.
Regulators, legal experts and infrastructure providers took part in the all-day event this week focused on decentralised finance, hosted by Blockchain Scotland.
The conference took place at the Informatics Forum at the University of Edinburgh, and featured leading speakers including Kara Kennedy, global head of market development at Kinexys – JP Morgan’s dedicated blockchain unit.
Fellow speakers included Theo Golden, CFA of Baillie Gifford, Alex Pollak of 21Shares, Matthew Dawson of the Ethereum Foundation, Dovile Silenskyte CFA of WisdomTree in Europe and Ruchir Dalmia of Polygon Labs.
Dr Maciej Zurawski, executive director of Blockchain Scotland and CEO of Redeem Technologies, said: “Scotland has been a centre for financial innovation for three centuries, from the invention of modern banking and the first overdraft to the creation of large-scale long-term asset management in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
“Tokenisation is the next chapter of that story. The country combines globally significant asset managers, one of the strongest cryptography and blockchain research bases in Europe at the University of Edinburgh, a growing fintech cluster, and a Scottish Government that takes digital assets seriously.”
“This matters for growth.Tokenisation can lower the cost of issuing, distributing and settling financial assets, open up private markets to a wider investor base, and bring 24/7 programmable settlement into mainstream finance. Regulation is now catching up with what the technology has been able to do for some time, and the UK is positioning itself as one of the jurisdictions where that catch-up is happening fastest.”
The industry is now embedding digital assets as part of its core offer. JP Morgan’s Kinexys business now settles around $5 billion in blockchain-based transactions every day, with cumulative volume exceeding $3 trillion since it was set up in 2015.
Major asset managers are running live tokenised funds and the Bank of England and HM Treasury are running the Digital Securities Sandbox and the Digital Gilt Instrument pilot. The Financial Conduct Authority is preparing its crypto authorisation gateway and UK Finance and the major banks are testing tokenised deposits through the Great British Tokenised Deposits pilot. Markets infrastructure firms are issuing on public chains.
Dr Zurawski added: “What used to be a research conversation has become a delivery conversation. The institutions building these rails need a venue to compare notes, agree on what is working, and pressure-test what is coming next. That is what the summit is for.”