The Global Risks Alliance (GRA)
Tokenisation records claims on money, securities and other assets as tokens on programmable ledgers, so that transfer, settlement and some servicing can happen on one platform. Central banks, commercial banks and market infrastructures are testing tokenised deposits, wholesale central bank money and tokenised bonds and funds. Design choices decide where settlement finality, legal certainty and operational risk sit. This page sets out how tokenised market infrastructure works, where its risks lie, and who decides its rules.
GRA · Established · service level R0
Tokenisation records claims on money, securities and other assets as tokens on programmable ledgers so that transfer, settlement and some servicing happen on one platform. Its risks depend on the settlement asset, on liquidity needs moved forward by atomic settlement, on legal finality and on ledgers that rebuild silos.
How a failure at one financial centre can spread through settlement links. Design links, not real dependencies.
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Digital assets and tokenisation · Fintech F1 · Week 17
| Women | 63 | 3 | Within |
| Rural | 42 | 5 | Review |
| Under 25 | 37 | 4 | Within |
Digital market infrastructure and risks. The dossier below sets out how the risk develops, what is measured, where the data come from, how it is modelled and who decides.
A tokenised trade can settle in central bank money, tokenised commercial bank money or a stablecoin. Each carries different credit and liquidity risk, and the PFMI expect settlement in central bank money where practical and available.
Delivery versus payment on one ledger can remove principal risk, but both legs must be prefunded at the moment of settlement. Liquidity that netting once saved now has to be found in advance.
A ledger can record a transfer as final while insolvency law, securities law or the token's terms leave its legal status uncertain. Finality has to be defined in the rulebook, not inferred from the consensus protocol.
Separate platforms for each asset, bank or jurisdiction need bridges and interoperability layers to connect. Each connection adds an operational and cyber dependency and can trap liquidity on one platform.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Tokenised deposit | A commercial bank deposit represented as a token on a ledger, still a liability of the bank. |
| Atomic settlement | Settlement in which both legs of a transaction complete together or not at all. |
| Settlement finality | The point at which a transfer becomes irrevocable and unconditional in law. |
Each indicator carries its unit, its cadence, the kind of source behind it and the evidence label a value would carry. No values are shown: a programme supplies them under its own authority.
| Indicator | Unit | Cadence | Source type | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tokenised assets on regulated platforms | outstanding value in reporting currency | quarterly | Platform and supervisor disclosures | REPORTED |
| Tokenised settlement in central bank money | percent of settlement value | quarterly | Operator records | OFFICIAL |
| Ledger platform availability | percent of scheduled operating time | monthly | Operator logs | OBSERVED |
| Settlement fails on tokenised platforms | percent of settlement instructions | monthly | Operator records | OBSERVED |
| Interoperability connections per platform | count of bridges and gateways | quarterly | Platform documentation | DECLARED |
| Central bank tokenisation and CBDC projects by stage | count by research, pilot and launch | annual | Central bank surveys and announcements | OFFICIAL |
| Participants in pilot regimes and sandboxes | count of firms and infrastructures | annual | Regulator registers | OFFICIAL |
The topic as a computational graph: named sources feed the methods, an evidence review gates the outputs, and the decisions stay with the authorities that hold them.
Fig. 02Nodes carry their type, two metric rows and a state; connectors show what feeds what; dashed frames name the owners; the timeline is the cadence. Design of the pipeline, not a record of a run.
Named public datasets and institutional records, each with its licence class. Sources by agreement are used only under their terms and never republished.
| Source | What it gives | Licence class |
|---|---|---|
| BIS survey of central banks on digital currencies and crypto | Stage of central bank work on retail and wholesale CBDC and tokenisation | Free, attribution under BIS terms of use |
| BIS Innovation Hub project reports | Designs, findings and stated limits of wholesale settlement and tokenisation experiments | Free, attribution under BIS terms of use |
| ESMA register under the DLT Pilot Regime | Market infrastructures permitted to operate DLT trading and settlement systems in the EU | Public register, ESMA terms |
| FSB and CPMI reports on tokenisation | Assessments of financial stability and market infrastructure implications | Free, attribution under FSB and BIS terms |
| Central bank and securities regulator sandbox registers | Participants and scope of tokenisation pilots by jurisdiction | Public records, terms per authority |
| Public ledger records | Token issuance, transfers and contract code on permissionless networks | Open data, terms per network |
Fintech Nexus prepares evidence. The decisions below are taken by the authorities named, under their own rules, and never by the platform.
| Who decides | The question | Evidence this page serves |
|---|---|---|
| Central banks | Whether and how to make central bank money available for settlement on tokenised platforms | Settlement asset design notes, pilot findings, liquidity effects of atomic settlement |
| Securities regulators and market infrastructure overseers | Whether a ledger-based system meets the PFMI and the rules for trading and settlement | PFMI mapping, availability and fail records, finality analysis |
| Boards of market infrastructures and banks | Whether to issue, settle or service assets on a tokenised platform, and against which settlement asset | Dependency maps, legal finality analysis, operational resilience evidence |
| Legislators and justice ministries | Whether property, securities and insolvency law recognise tokenised holdings and ledger finality | Comparative legal notes, legal gaps identified in pilots |
Distributed ledgers maintain a shared record across many participants, with rules for validating changes. Permissionless ledgers are open to anyone; permissioned ledgers restrict participation to known entities, which is the more common model for regulated tokenization projects. Programmable code on the ledger can automate actions such as transfer conditions or interest distribution, which brings efficiency and also the risk that coding errors are executed automatically.
Atomic settlement, where asset and payment move together, can reduce counterparty risk but requires both legs to be available on compatible ledgers at the same time, which raises liquidity demands. Stablecoins aim to hold a fixed value through reserves or other mechanisms; their stability depends on the quality, liquidity and legal segregation of reserves, and several have failed or lost their peg under stress.
Legal certainty is central: whether a token confers ownership, how insolvency law treats it and which jurisdiction applies. Crypto-asset market failures have shown risks from leverage, conflicts of interest, poor custody and fraud.
Analysing the rights represented by tokens across jurisdictions.
Studying ledger design, consensus and code risk.
On-ledger and market data; data quality and wash trading complicate analysis.
Limits: many tokenization projects are pilots, so evidence on performance at scale is limited, and on-ledger data do not show off-ledger obligations.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.