Bank of England and Royal Exchange buildings in the City of London

Britain’s 54-Firm Tokenization Push Starts With the Market Nobody Sees

By Isaac • July 13, 2026 8:07 am • Comments

Britain has assembled 54 firms from global finance and crypto for a tokenization program.

The first live test will happen in a market most retail investors never see.

Repo.

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That short word describes the secured borrowing market that helps banks, dealers and funds turn high-quality securities into cash. It is part of the daily plumbing behind bond markets and institutional liquidity.

The UK wants to put an end-to-end repo transaction on blockchain, test it across firms and borders, and use the result as the foundation for a wider tokenized market.

The City of London Corporation’s Digital Markets Champion page says the cross-industry taskforce now includes 54 firms and will work over the next 12 months with Chris Woolard, the government’s Wholesale Digital Markets Champion.

Nine Action Groups will divide the work across primary issuance, secondary markets, collateral, cash and market infrastructure, tax, law, financial-crime compliance, resilience and communications. Those groups are supposed to produce common standards and feed their work into the same repo use case.

The page sets an aggressive goal: complete as much testing as possible and ideally run a live repo trial by spring 2027. The broader program also covers tokenized collateral, secondary trading and the UK’s planned DIGIT digital gilt instrument.

This structure forces specialists who normally solve one part of a transaction to confront the entire chain. A tokenized security has limited value if a buyer cannot trade it, finance it, post it as collateral and settle the cash leg with legal certainty.

Ripple, one of the taskforce members, argued that the market has moved beyond demonstrations:

A repo, short for repurchase agreement, usually begins when one party sells a security for cash and agrees to buy it back later at a slightly higher price.

Economically, it works like a secured loan. The security serves as collateral, the cash funds the borrower and the price difference reflects the financing cost.

Large institutions use repo to finance inventories, manage liquidity, support market making and move collateral where it is needed. The market depends on exact records of ownership, eligibility, valuation and settlement timing.

Tokenization could make those records easier to update and assets easier to move. A well-designed system can reduce reconciliation between separate databases, shorten settlement windows and let cash and collateral exchange in the same transaction.

Repo is also an unforgiving test.

A system can issue a digital bond in a controlled pilot and still fail under daily funding pressure. Repo exposes whether tokenized collateral is legally recognized, operationally available, accurately valued and transferable when markets are moving fast.

The first report from the Wholesale Digital Markets Champion makes that end-to-end problem the center of the UK program. Its primary use cases are repo, fixed income and uncleared over-the-counter derivatives, with repo designated as the main focus for the coming year.

The report recommends an immediate DIGIT pilot issuance no later than the first quarter of 2027, followed by live secondary-market trading and additional digital-gilt issuance. It also asks the Bank of England to be prepared to accept DIGIT as collateral in its Sterling Monetary Framework.

The 54-member roster spans the market. BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, State Street and UBS appear beside Coinbase, Circle, Ripple, Kraken, Fireblocks, Chainalysis, Ava Labs, Canton, exchanges, clearing houses and specialist infrastructure firms.

That mix is deliberate. Asset managers can define what investors will buy.

Banks and dealers can explain funding and balance-sheet requirements. Exchanges, custodians and clearing firms can test market infrastructure.

Crypto companies can contribute wallets, ledgers, token standards and settlement tools.

Membership does not amount to a platform award. The report does not select XRP Ledger, Base, Avalanche, Canton, Ethereum, Solana, USDC or any other chain or token for the repo trial.

That distinction is important for crypto investors because several members have obvious commercial interests.

Ripple’s presence does not guarantee XRPL deployment. Circle’s seat does not guarantee that USDC becomes the cash leg.

Coinbase’s participation does not make Base the settlement network.

The taskforce will have to choose or connect systems based on institutional requirements, then prove that the chosen design works across firms.

The economic projections are enormous and conditional.

The report cites an estimate that tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035, equal to roughly 16% of global investable assets under that scenario. It also cites Barclays and PwC estimates of up to £33 billion in additional annual UK output and £14 billion in annual tax revenue by 2035.

Those UK figures depend on global tokenization reaching scale, Britain becoming a leading jurisdiction and domestic adoption keeping pace with major peers. They are an upside case, not revenue already secured.

The report also points to live evidence that repo tokenization can process serious volume. Broadridge’s digital repo platform reportedly handled an average of $368 billion in daily transactions during April 2026, nearly $8 trillion across the month.

That record shows the technology can support institutional activity in a defined network. Britain’s challenge is broader: make tokenized assets, cash, law and market infrastructure work together across a national financial center.

The regulators have already built a place to test pieces of that system.

The FCA and Bank of England’s May tokenization consultation says 16 firms had passed the first stage of the Digital Securities Sandbox and were working toward live operation.

The sandbox lets firms test issuance, trading and settlement of tokenized securities inside a regulated environment. Its current focus includes bonds, equities and fund units, and the authorities expect to publish a full cross-authority roadmap later in 2026.

The consultation asks how firms can invest with enough regulatory clarity to scale beyond a test. That step is crucial because a sandbox can establish technical feasibility while leaving capital treatment, settlement finality, custody and long-term authorization unresolved.

The new taskforce gives industry a delivery structure beside that regulatory process. The Action Groups can turn recurring legal and operational problems into common standards instead of forcing every participant to solve them alone.

The government has also put a deadline around the work.

HM Treasury’s terms of reference require the Digital Markets Champion to coordinate a cross-industry taskforce, address distributed-ledger interoperability and submit a full report to the Chancellor by July 2027.

Interoperability may decide whether the program creates a market or another collection of isolated systems. Banks already hold assets and cash across many ledgers, custodians and settlement venues. A tokenized instrument that cannot move or be recognized outside one network can add a new silo.

The Treasury mandate therefore reaches beyond putting existing securities into digital wrappers. The market has to preserve legal rights while allowing assets, cash and transaction data to travel between old and new infrastructure.

The 2027 report is scheduled to arrive after the target window for the spring repo trial, giving the government a chance to judge actual transactions rather than architecture diagrams.

The size of the group has already drawn attention:

For public blockchains, the opportunity is large but demanding.

A network that wins institutional business will need predictable performance, privacy controls, identity and compliance layers, reliable custody, strong governance and connectivity to other ledgers. Low transaction fees alone will not settle a wholesale market.

For stablecoin issuers and tokenized-deposit providers, the cash leg could be even more valuable than the security token.

Repo requires money and collateral to move together. If one side settles instantly while the other waits inside an older payment system, much of the efficiency disappears.

Legal finality is another hard limit. Market participants must know when a transfer cannot be reversed, how ownership survives insolvency and which jurisdiction’s rules apply in a cross-border transaction.

The taskforce can produce standards and demonstrations. Adoption will depend on liquidity, commercial incentives and institutions continuing to use the system after public support and pilot budgets fade.

That makes repo a smart first test.

It is a repetitive, high-value market where trapped collateral, settlement failures and duplicate reconciliation create real costs. Any improvement should be measurable.

It is also difficult enough to expose weak designs quickly.

Britain has put 54 firms in the room and chosen the financial market few people talk about.

If they can make repo work from end to end, the louder tokenization markets may finally have infrastructure strong enough to follow.

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