This edition of OMFIF’s Digital Monetary Institute Journal has two parts. In the first part, our expert members give their opinions on where tokenisation is heading, where the process is taking us and how to approach outstanding issues along the way. The journal features fascinating contributions from: Circle, Swift, Global Trade Finance, JP Morgan’s Onyx, Giesecke+Devrient, Moody’s, Idemia, EY and DZ BANK.

The second part of the journal is based on discussions that took place at the 2024 Digital money summit, our annual flagship event where experts and policy-makers discussed the future of money.

Week after week, someone releases a new estimate of how many trillions of dollars of assets will be tokenised in the next few years. Breathless optimism around the promise of a new technology is hardly rare in the tech world, and they don’t always pan out as expected. But for tokenisation, the excitement has spread well beyond the boardrooms of Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

More renowned institutions like the Bank for International Settlements have planted their flag in the camp that holds that tokenisation should become the plumbing of the financial systems of the future. In their ‘Finternet’ paper, the BIS lays out a vision of an ecosystem where assets from an enormous variety of classes are tokenised, allowing them to be seamlessly exchanged for tokenised versions of cash without settlement delays and the risks and costs they entail.