About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

ESMA Recommends Digital Token Identifier for Pilot of Distributed Ledger Technology Regulation

Subscribe to our newsletter

ESMA has recommended use of the ISO standard Digital Token Identifier (DTI) for the pilot of its Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) regulatory regimen. DTIs are issued by the DTI Foundation, a non-profit division of Etrading Software, with a view to bringing standardisation to digital asset and crypto markets.

The DLT pilot will apply from 23 March 2023, extending the EU’s MiFIR reporting regime to cover tokenised financial instruments, and bringing pre- and post-trade transparency and market abuse monitoring to DLT-based securities.

The DTI Foundation issued its first official DTI codes back in November 2021 and has since gone on to issue the identifiers for over a thousand of the most commonly traded digital assets, with more codes being added every day.

Jim Northey, chair of ISO TC68 Financial Services, says: “The ISO 24165 DTI standard has been designed to work well with existing ISO standards that are used for regulatory reporting. The DTI simplifies the addition of digital asset trading and reporting into existing systems.”

Sassan Danesh, CEO of Etrading Software, comments: “Our mission is to increase market stability, transparency and efficiency in the digital asset space and we will continue to work with public authorities and industry to provide this service to the benefit of all stakeholders.”

The DTI is designed to help market participants and public authorities unambiguously identify digital assets and DLTs using ISO standards. The identifier enables EU regulators to monitor digital asset trades for anti-money laundering and combating terrorist financing requirements, as well as systemic risks arising from trading of stable-coins and other digital assets. For financial institutions, the DTI provides the ability to monitor market data for tokenised securities using globally standardised reference data.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Best Practices for Managing Trade Surveillance

The surge in trading volumes combined with the emergence of new digital financial assets and geopolitical events have added layers of complexity to market activities. Traditional surveillance methods often struggle to keep pace with these changes, leading to difficulties in detecting sophisticated market abuses and increased regulatory risk. To address these challenges, financial institutions are...

BLOG

SteelEye’s 2025 Compliance Health Check – Bigger Budgets, Smarter Tech – But Challenges Remain

SteelEye’s 2025 Compliance Health Check Report captures how firms responded to compliance pressures during 2024. A review of the same report for 2023 reveals a clear rebound in spending and technology adoption after a brief post-pandemic hiatus, yet it also underscores persistent gaps in manual work, channel coverage and enforcement readiness. In the 2024 data...

EVENT

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 16th year, the Data Management Summit (DMS) in London brings together the European capital markets enterprise data management community, to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

The DORA Implementation Playbook: A Practitioner’s Guide to Demonstrating Resilience Beyond the Deadline

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) has fundamentally reshaped the European Union’s financial regulatory landscape, with its full application beginning on January 17, 2025. This regulation goes beyond traditional risk management, explicitly acknowledging that digital incidents can threaten the stability of the entire financial system. As the deadline has passed, the focus is now shifting...