Archive
Every issue of the newsletter. Each piece lives on Substack — click through to read.
13 October 2026
Industry told the FCA and the Bank of England that collateral is what tokenisation is for. ESMA's new call for evidence asks the harder question: whether a clearing house can turn a tokenised asset into cash, legally and on time, when a member fails. It has seen exactly one such project in EU central clearing.
Read on Substack →8 October 2026
The EBA, ESMA and the European System of Central Banks have all answered the Commission's MiCA review, and all three say tokenised securities belong in securities law, not crypto law. The more important part is where they locate the real problem: legal title, settlement finality, and national property law that differs from one member state to the next. A day later, the Bank of England said much the same about the UK.
Read on Substack →30 September 2026
The coverage said the Bank of England had approved live settlement of tokenised gilts and FTSE 350 shares. The Bank's own approval notice says ClearToken will issue Tokenised Depository Interests, one for one against assets an FCA-authorised custodian holds. The UK has now licensed one native depository and one wrapper, and written the legal claim into both licences. Native versus wrapper was never the right test.
Read on Substack →24 September 2026
The Eurosystem's Pontes went live on 21 September, settling tokenised assets in central bank money with thirteen banks and four ledger operators. The obvious read is that the euro area is years ahead of the UK. The ECB's own date for full implementation is 2028, the Bank of England's is 2028, and in both designs the payment only becomes final in the conventional settlement system.
Read on Substack →17 September 2026
The FCA and Bank of England finally published their tokenisation feedback statement. Collateral was by far the most frequently mentioned use case, and the two features that dominate every tokenisation pitch deck were rarely raised at all. The blockers industry named are an insolvency statute and the Basel framework, neither of which a better ledger fixes.
Read on Substack →19 August 2026
On 7 August, Chainlink published a readout from inside the Bank of England's Synchronisation Lab showing the cash leg and the asset leg of a trade completing as one conditional step. It is the first concrete technical proof from the Bank's own side of the tokenisation problem. It is also simulated sterling, and the live service is still targeted for 2028.
Read on Substack →4 August 2026
The European Commission's targeted review of MiCA, open for responses until 30 September after an extension, names tokenised fund interests and tokenised money-market instruments as cases regulators cannot cleanly classify. Barely eighteen months after the regime went live, Brussels is asking in public the question this newsletter has been circling since Issue 1, and officials are already signalling the answer may be a full rewrite.
Read on Substack →21 July 2026
Swift declared its shared ledger ready for use on 9 July, with seventeen banks, HSBC, UBS, Lloyds and Standard Chartered among them, set to pilot tokenised deposit transfers 24/7. A bank-issued deposit token and a stablecoin can look identical in a wallet. The legal perimeter behind each is not.
Read on Substack →7 July 2026
The joint FCA and Bank of England consultation on tokenised wholesale markets closed on 3 July, and most coverage moved on without mentioning what was actually agreed. Read past the shared-vision language and four dated commitments emerge, each running through 2028.
Read on Substack →30 June 2026
Three events fall in the first week of July: the DTCC begins tokenised production trades, Securitize lists on the NYSE, and the MiCA deadline forces a crypto-services reckoning. Read separately they are a pilot, an IPO, and a cut-off. Read together they show the boundary between traditional finance and tokenisation dissolving from both sides.
Read on Substack →24 June 2026
The EU's crypto deadline does not touch tokenised securities. It lands hard on everyone else. Most crypto-asset firms are still unlicensed with a week to go, and the shakeout reveals how differently Europe's two tokenisation tracks are maturing.
Read on Substack →16 June 2026
While the market watched the MiCA deadline, the FCA quietly turned its fund tokenisation sandbox into binding rules. Two changes in PS26/7 matter, and both are already in force.
Read on Substack →9 June 2026
The EU's crypto rulebook does not cover tokenised bonds, shares, or fund units. Here is why, and what does.
Read on Substack →2 June 2026
The regulators' joint framework was read as a friendly signal and little more. Read closely, it is something firmer: a set of concrete commitments with a deadline of 3 July, and a working window for the people who will have to operate inside the rules.
Read on Substack →