At a panel session on the convergence of traditional and digital market infrastructure at A-Team Group’s inaugural ExchangeTech Summit in London earlier this month, an audience poll set the framing for the discussion that followed. Asked where their firm sat today on tokenisation and DLT-based market infrastructure, the largest single response from a room of around 120 senior capital markets technologists was “exploring, but nothing committed.” Nobody answered “not on our roadmap.”
The five panellists – Wail Azizi, Chief Strategy Officer at Equiduct; Paul Lambert, Chief Executive at New Change FX; Jamie Bell, Head of Capital Markets at the FCA; Emilie Rieupeyroux, Head of Market Strategy for Cash Equity Trading and Data Services at Euronext; and Tim Meggs, Chief Executive and Co-Founder of crypto-native HFT firm LO:TECH – reacted to the poll result with measured surprise. One panellist pointed to the DTCC pilot launching in July and Nasdaq’s tokenised venue work as evidence that institutional infrastructure activity is well advanced and would have expected more of the room to be involved. Another was blunter: the activity is happening, but largely outside the room.That gap – between where the institutional audience sits and where tokenised market activity is genuinely accumulating – framed the rest of the conversation.
The same-instrument, two-railways problem
The most substantive disagreement on the panel concerned where tokenisation credibly delivers value in the near term. One line of argument was that the listed cash equities use case is largely a solved problem dressed up as an unsolved one. Post-trade costs for a major bank in listed European equities already sit comfortably under a basis point. T+1 settlement is arriving in Europe shortly. Multiple CCPs operate with broadly functional interoperability. Cross-asset and cross-group netting are established. Against that baseline, applying a parallel tokenised rail to an existing listed instrument creates “one stock, one ISIN, two settlement rails” – a reconciliation overhead that, in the words of one panellist, becomes “a tax” rather than a feature.
The countervailing argument was that the technology underneath tokenisation has quietly moved past the performance constraints that defined the previous cycle. Layer-one and layer-two networks now support throughput sufficient to sit under genuine order books, and a wave of capital and infrastructure investment is reshaping what is possible. CoinGecko’s RWA Report 2026 puts perpetual futures volume on real-world assets at $524.8 billion in Q1 2026 alone, significantly more than the $313 billion recorded for the whole of 2025. RWA.xyz tracks total tokenised real-world assets, excluding stablecoins, growing from around $21 billion at the start of 2026 to roughly $27.5 billion by the end of Q1 – with tokenised US Treasuries accounting for $13.4 billion of that.
Both positions can be true. The first describes the institutional listed-equity stack as it operates today. The second describes a parallel market structure forming on-chain, populated largely by retail flow, perpetuals, and tokenised wrappers on traditional exposures. The institutional question – which the panel did not resolve – is at what point, and on what instruments, those two stacks begin to compete for the same liquidity.
Atomic settlement and the netting question
A productive middle ground emerged on the architecture question. Atomic delivery-versus-payment is one of the most-cited theoretical benefits of DLT-based market infrastructure, but as one panellist noted, traditional CCP netting offsets around 99% of gross flows. Atomic settlement of both legs of every trade would eliminate that offset and substantially increase the cost of capital for participants. For large banks, the trade-off is unfavourable: real-time settlement is faster but more expensive in capital terms than current arrangements.
One speaker suggested that there is, at present, effectively zero institutional demand for real-time atomic settlement. There is, however, meaningful interest in end-of-day T+0 settlement – a middle path that preserves intraday netting while delivering same-day finality and faster inventory recycling. That framing recasts the conversation: not atomic versus traditional, but a calibration of when the settlement finality clock should stop.
The regulatory direction of travel
The FCA and Bank of England are expected to publish a call for input shortly on the future state of tokenised trading in the UK. The framing, as described on the panel, is deliberately technology-neutral: regulators are not opposed to decentralised solutions in principle, provided they can deliver regulated outcomes. It was acknowledged that, to date, no fully decentralised solution has demonstrated end-to-end capability across the operational requirements of regulated markets – trading halts, short-selling restrictions, and accountability for failure among them. Permissioned networks are expected to remain the predominant model for institutional infrastructure for the foreseeable future.
The accountability question recurred throughout. Traditional infrastructure participants want a named legal entity on the hook when something goes wrong. DeFi protocols, often structured through foundations in offshore jurisdictions, do not deliver that clarity. One panellist argued that public smart contract code is at least scrutable in a way that proprietary algorithmic trading systems are not – audits and pre-deployment review are possible in principle, even if bugs still occur in practice. Both points stand, and the regulatory framework that emerges will need to accommodate both.
What hasn’t been solved
Asked what they had expected to be solved by now that hasn’t been, the panel converged on a small set of themes: post-trade infrastructure remains the unfulfilled promise; the legal characterisation of token ownership remains inconsistent across jurisdictions, even within the EU; common price discovery methodologies bridging tokenised and traditional markets remain absent; and the off-exchange, OTC and private credit segments – where the operational economics of tokenisation are most favourable – remain largely untouched.
The convergence is happening. The institutional buy-side, on the evidence of the room, hasn’t yet decided whether to join it.
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