Tokenisation’s Real Barrier Is Perception, Not Regulation, Summit Panel Argues

Stablecoins account for roughly $300 billion of tokenised value, intraday repo products are running at billions per day on distributed ledger infrastructure, and at least one retail venue has processed $25 billion in tokenised equity trading. Yet institutional adoption remains sluggish, held back, a panel at A-Team Group’s TradingTech Summit London 2026 argued, less by legal or regulatory obstacles than by the industry’s own perception that clarity is lacking.

The session, “Rewriting Market Structure with Tokenisation and 24/7 Trading,” was moderated by Ian Salmon, Co-Founder of IgniteG2M Limited. Panellists were Will Winzor Saile, Partner, Execution Analytics & Architecture at Rothschild & Co Redburn; Benjamin Santos-Stephens, CEO of ClearToken; and Simon Forster, Managing Director and Global Co-Head of Digital Assets at TP ICAP.

Where tokenisation is working today

On the retail side, the panel noted that Binance alone has 350 million users and that Kraken’s tokenised equity product has processed $25 billion in volume. In wholesale markets, both Broadridge’s distributed ledger repo product and the former JPMorgan Coin are running intraday repo at billions per day. The common thread, one speaker argued, is that representing assets as tokens has proved operationally easier than moving the underlying instruments.

The regulatory clarity debate

An audience poll identified regulatory uncertainty as the dominant barrier to adoption. The panel’s response was sharply divided.

From the institutional perspective, one panellist acknowledged that demand has not materialised: as a broker, his firm trades where it sees liquidity and in the manner clients want, and neither the regulatory framework nor the settlement mechanics are yet in place to make tokenised equities fungible with traditional markets.

That drew a pointed response. Another panellist cited direct experience with firms attempting to issue GBP stablecoins, all of which remain frustrated by insufficient clarity to bring products to market. The panel agreed that the UK’s regulatory culture – where acting without explicit permission risks criminal sanction rather than the civil litigation route common in the US – creates a higher threshold for perceived certainty. The clarity may exist in statute, but for some use cases it has not yet translated into operational confidence.

Infrastructure and custody: who secures what

An audience question on blockchain security drew a distinction between public permissionless networks such as Ethereum and Solana, where anyone can operate a node, and private permissioned chains such as Hedera and Canton, where operators are known and vetted. The critical point, one speaker argued, is that placing an asset on a blockchain does not by itself constitute a legal act. A token issued by a CSD is a representation of a book entry, analogous to a share certificate rather than the register itself. If the token is lost on a public chain with no backing register, it is gone; if a register exists, errors can be corrected. He cited the DTCC’s plans to launch a tokenisation service for US equities in the second half of 2026 as an example of the register-backed model at scale.

Another panellist drew a parallel with the internet and intranets of the late 1990s: private blockchains dominated industry events five years ago, but the assets likely to proliferate will be those on public rails, because open infrastructure allows value to move more freely and will ultimately be cheaper. From the equity trading desk perspective, the more immediate constraint is fungibility. Until tokenised equities can interact with traditional market structure and settlement mechanics are agreed, institutional adoption will remain limited.

Settlement flexibility, not atomic settlement

The panel converged most strongly around the argument that flexible settlement – not atomic settlement – represents the genuine transformation. One speaker described atomic settlement as a misapplied term frequently cited as a holy grail that eliminates the need for clearing. The real opportunity, he argued, is precision: traditional cycles are measured in days, whereas tokenised infrastructure allows settlement to be calibrated to the transaction; immediately for an urgent asset need, at a scheduled window to maximise netting, or at intervals that balance capital efficiency against risk.

From the clearing infrastructure perspective, one speaker outlined a tiered model: hourly continuous net settlement at the clearing house, with the CSD settling every 15 seconds on a net basis, considered the practical limit of synchronising across multiple cloud data centres. Gross real-time settlement would also be available. The infrastructure, he argued, should provide tools rather than prescribe frequency.

The corollary is a new funding dynamic. The current T+2 convention provides two days of effectively free financing. If settlement can occur instantly, the market will need to price the difference. One panellist cited a conversation with a major card provider exploring stablecoin payments for gig workers, where the firm had already identified a discounted price for immediate cash versus next-day payment. The market, he suggested, will develop an intraday funding curve resolved through repo and securities lending.

The 2030 outlook

Asked whether direct-access digital venues will irreversibly fragment liquidity, the panel offered a broadly aligned view. One panellist predicted institutions will be trading digitised equities fungibly alongside existing market structure within five years, but at a small share of total volume. Fragmentation is expected in the near term as new venues compete, but historical precedent suggests reconsolidation: markets fragment, venues lose their initial differentiator, and the industry settles at a number it can sustainably support.

A more bullish outlook from one panellist suggested that US equity markets will all operate 24/7 by 2030, with major exchanges having announced 2026 timelines for extended hours. All asset classes, the speaker argued, will converge toward a common trading model as tokenisation standardises settlement and financing mechanics. Another panellist agreed on the inevitability of 24/7 trading, citing CME’s recent announcement as the latest major exchange to move in that direction, but cautioned that newly tokenised assets such as Robinhood’s SpaceX stock raise legal and market questions that will take time to resolve. Over time, however, the overall effect should enhance rather than diminish global liquidity.

The session’s closing audience poll reinforced the point: 24/7 trading registered as a present concern, not a distant prospect, bringing with it operational challenges that most firms are still working through for T+1 settlement alone.

The overarching message was that the infrastructure, the legal frameworks and the early commercial evidence are more advanced than institutional perception acknowledges. The gap between readiness and adoption is increasingly a matter of perception, not permission.