Digital Assets Week London 2026

At Digital Assets Week in London, one message stood out above all others: the conversation around digital assets has matured significantly. The industry's focus is no longer on whether assets can be tokenized. Instead, attention is shifting toward how tokenization can improve the functioning of financial markets through better collateral management, liquidity optimisation, treasury operations and post-trade infrastructure.

What We Are Hearing 

Discussions repeatedly pointed to collateral mobility as one of the most compelling institutional use cases currently emerging. Participants highlighted the potential for tokenized money market funds (MMFs), tokenized cash and stablecoins to support margin management, repo activity and treasury functions, addressing longstanding inefficiencies associated with moving and funding collateral. Several speakers noted that blockchain's greatest contribution may not be increased collateral mobility itself, but greater collateral velocity, enabling assets to be deployed where and when they are needed.

Most participants agreed that technology is no longer the primary obstacle. Attention has shifted toward governance, regulation, operational readiness and market structure. Institutional investors are increasingly focused on questions around acceptable collateral, legal certainty, counterparty risk, infrastructure resilience and interoperability. The challenge is becoming less about creating assets on-chain and more about ensuring that different infrastructures, legal frameworks and market participants can interact seamlessly.

Many discussions suggested that the greatest opportunity may lie not in bringing public securities on chain, but in modernising the infrastructure that supports them. Clearing, settlement, custody, fund administration, collateral management and treasury operations were all identified as areas where distributed ledger technology could deliver meaningful efficiencies. Institutions appeared considerably more interested in reducing operational friction and improving capital efficiency than in enabling around-the-clock trading.

Market Implications

A recurring message throughout the conference was that institutional adoption increasingly depends on trust, governance and transparency. As digital asset products become more sophisticated and interconnected, market participants require a better understanding of the risks embedded within these structures. Transaction transparency alone is no longer sufficient.

As market discussions shift from crypto assets to financial infrastructure, risk transparency is becoming as important as transaction transparency. Vault Risk Assessments (VRA) seek to address this need by providing forward-looking views of portfolio, liquidity, governance, protocol and blockchain risks, offering market participants additional risk insights.

Looking Ahead

The event reinforced the view that the next phase of digital asset adoption is likely to be driven by infrastructure rather than investment products alone. Collateral mobility, tokenized MMFs, interoperability and post-trade transformation emerged as the most credible pathways to institutional scale. The discussion is moving beyond tokenizing assets and toward building more efficient capital markets, with transparency, governance and risk management increasingly determining which solutions gain institutional acceptance.