The UK government has assembled a 54-firm taskforce to move tokenised assets out of pilot programs and into live wholesale financial markets, with BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Barclays, UBS, Coinbase, Circle, Ripple and Kraken all signing on. The group was convened by Chris Woolard, HM Treasury’s Wholesale Digital Markets Champion and former chair of the Financial Conduct Authority, who published his first report to the Chancellor at 09:00 London time on Monday, 13 July 2026. The taskforce has 12 months to deliver a working end-to-end use case, starting with tokenised repo. The pitch to Westminster is economic: up to £33 billion in additional annual output and £14 billion in annual tax revenue by 2035.
Tokenisation is the practice of recording ownership of a real asset, such as a bond, a fund share or a unit of collateral, as a digital token on a blockchain so it can be transferred and settled without the paperwork and delay of legacy market infrastructure.
Key takeaways
- HM Treasury’s Wholesale Digital Markets Champion Chris Woolard published his inaugural report on 13 July 2026 and convened a 54-firm taskforce backed by the City of London Corporation.
- Members include BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Barclays, UBS, Citi, LSEG, DTCC, Euroclear, Coinbase, Circle, Ripple, Kraken, Fireblocks, Chainalysis and Wintermute.
- The first live target is tokenised repo. Nine action groups will cover primary issuance, collateral, funds, payment rails, legal certainty, interoperability, financial crime, tax neutrality and resilience.
- The report projects up to £33 billion added to UK annual economic output and £14 billion in annual tax revenue by 2035. Boston Consulting Group estimates the tokenised real-world asset market could reach $88 trillion by then.
Published: 13 July 2026, 16:30 UTC
Why the UK is moving now
The report frames tokenisation as a race the UK can lose by standing still. Britain has already run trials, including DIGIT, the UK’s digital gilt instrument, but the Woolard report argues that pilots are no longer enough while the United States and the European Union work out their own routes to putting wholesale markets on chain.
“Like all network games, it is a race and one where the U.K. needs to move at the speed of the most agile players if we want to ensure we have a stake in developing the approach for international markets,” Woolard said in the report.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves backed the initiative in the City of London Corporation’s announcement, saying tokenisation would “make our markets even more competitive, attract investment to the economy, and drive growth across the UK.” City of London Policy Chairman Chris Hayward called it a chance to lead “a digital Big Bang in financial services,” a deliberate echo of the 1986 deregulation that made London a global trading centre.
What the taskforce will actually build
The first concrete deliverable is a live end-to-end tokenised repo transaction. A repurchase agreement, or repo, is a short-term loan in which one party sells securities and agrees to buy them back at a set price, and it is the plumbing that keeps banks and funds funded day to day. Repo is a sensible first target because it is high-volume, collateral-heavy and settles on tight timelines, which is exactly where faster settlement pays for itself.
Nine action groups will run in parallel across primary issuance including DIGIT, tokenised collateral, tokenised funds, payment rails, legal and regulatory certainty, interoperability standards, financial crime compliance, tax neutrality and operational resilience. The City of London Corporation will coordinate the work alongside TheCityUK, the Investment Association, UK Finance and Innovate Finance.
The membership list is the most striking part. It puts custodians and market infrastructure operators such as Euroclear, DTCC, Clearstream, LSEG and LCH in the same room as crypto-native firms including Coinbase, Kraken, Ripple, Fireblocks, Chainalysis and Wintermute, plus market makers Citadel Securities, Jane Street and Optiver. Tokenised markets only work if incumbents and crypto rails can settle against each other, and that has been the stumbling block in every previous attempt.
The settlement problem nobody has solved
The hard part is not issuing the token. It is paying for it.
Kirit Bhatia, Chief Digital Assets Officer at Banking Circle, told CoinDesk that funding, settlement and collateral mobility across networks remain the central challenge. “Tokenised markets will need payment infrastructure that can support real-time settlement, cross-border movement, multiple forms of regulated money and interoperability between stablecoins, tokenised deposits and existing fiat rails,” he said. “Without that, digital assets risk becoming faster at the edges but still constrained by the legacy plumbing underneath.”
That warning lines up with the IMF’s assessment earlier this month that tokenisation speeds up finance but can also transmit shocks faster, and with the infrastructure push already underway from incumbents. Swift launched a blockchain ledger with 17 global banks on 10 July, and asset managers have started shipping product, with New York Life listing its first tokenised bond fund at the end of June.
What comes next
Woolard’s report is the first of two. The taskforce works through the next 12 months with the goal of demonstrating live tokenised repo, after which the second report is expected to set out what government and regulators need to change on tax and legal certainty. Neither the Treasury nor the FCA has committed to a rule change on the back of this report, and the £33 billion figure is a 2035 projection, not a forecast of near-term revenue.
The practical test arrives well before then. If the taskforce cannot get a single repo trade to settle end to end on tokenised rails within a year, with real money and real collateral, the rest of the programme is theory.
Frequently asked questions
What is tokenised repo?
A repo is a short-term loan where securities are sold and bought back at an agreed price. Tokenised repo records both the collateral and the cash leg as digital tokens on a blockchain, so the trade can settle in minutes rather than clearing through several intermediaries over a day or more.
Which firms joined the UK tokenisation taskforce?
Fifty-four firms, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Barclays, UBS, Citi, Standard Chartered, Schroders, Fidelity International, LSEG, DTCC, Euroclear, Clearstream, Citadel Securities, Jane Street, Coinbase, Circle, Ripple, Kraken, Fireblocks, Chainalysis and Wintermute.
Is the £33 billion figure a government commitment?
No. It is an estimate of potential added annual economic output by 2035 contained in Woolard’s report, alongside £14 billion in projected annual tax revenue. It depends on tokenisation reaching scale, which the report says requires clear legal, regulatory and tax frameworks that do not yet exist.
How big could the tokenised asset market get?
Boston Consulting Group estimates tokenised real-world assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035, compared with roughly $3 trillion for the current crypto and stablecoin market combined.
Sources: City of London Corporation, HM Treasury Digital Markets Champion Report, CoinDesk, Boston Consulting Group
