CoinDesk
BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, HSBC and UBS are among 54 financial institutions joining a UK government-backed tokenization taskforce led by HM Treasury's Wholesale Digital Markets Champion Chris Woolard. The group, backed by the City of London Corporation, will spend the next year working on live tokenisation use cases across UK wholesale markets, starting with tokenised repo.
Woolard, who spent eight years as chair of the Financial Conduct Authority, framed tokenised markets as "a network game" and warned that "the UK's place in that game is not guaranteed." His report, addressed to the next Chancellor after Rachel Reeves, projects up to £33 billion ($44.2 billion at current FX) in annual economic output and £14 billion in annual tax revenue by 2035 if the UK moves at the speed of the most agile jurisdictions.
Why it matters
The taskforce puts Wall Street's biggest asset managers and primary dealers at the same table as HM Treasury, with a mandate to translate tokenization from pilot into production-grade market infrastructure. Boston Consulting Group estimates the tokenised real-world assets market could reach $88 trillion by 2035, dwarfing the roughly $3 trillion crypto and stablecoin market today. The UK is positioning London as the venue that captures a slice of that flow, against parallel pushes from the US and EU.
Market impact
Kirit Bhatia, Chief Digital Assets Officer at Banking Circle, flagged the hard part: tokenised assets need payment rails that support real-time settlement, cross-border movement, multiple forms of regulated money, and interoperability between stablecoins, tokenised deposits and existing fiat. Without that, he warned, "digital assets risk becoming faster at the edges but still constrained by the legacy plumbing underneath." Watch for the first tokenised-repo pilot specifications and any FCA sandbox routes the taskforce pushes forward as the real signal of momentum.
Frequently asked questions
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Which firms joined the UK tokenization taskforce?
BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, HSBC and UBS are among 54 financial institutions in the group, backed by the City of London Corporation and led by HM Treasury's Wholesale Digital Markets Champion Chris Woolard.
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What will the taskforce actually build?
The group has a one-year mandate to work on live tokenisation use cases across UK wholesale markets, starting with tokenised repo, and to push those use cases into production-grade market infrastructure.
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How big could the tokenised RWA market get?
Boston Consulting Group estimates the tokenised real-world assets market could reach $88 trillion by 2035, compared with the roughly $3 trillion crypto and stablecoin market today.
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What is the UK government's economic target for tokenisation?
Woolard's report projects up to £33 billion ($44.2 billion) in additional annual economic output and £14 billion in annual tax revenue by 2035 if London captures a meaningful share of tokenised wholesale activity.
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What is the main risk the taskforce has to solve?
Banking Circle's Kirit Bhatia warned that tokenised assets need payment rails supporting real-time settlement, cross-border movement and interoperability between stablecoins, tokenised deposits and existing fiat, or the market stays constrained by legacy plumbing.
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