Insights & Commentary

The BIS’s Project Agorá prototype demonstrates how tokenized central bank money and atomic settlement could reshape cross-border wholesale payments through faster settlement, embedded compliance, and interoperability without sacrificing national control.

SEBI’s 2026 pilot to tokenise corporate bonds using distributed ledger technology signals India’s growing push toward modernising debt market infrastructure through faster settlement, improved transparency, and regulated blockchain adoption.

DTCC and the Stellar Development Foundation have announced a partnership to bring tokenised stocks, ETFs, and US Treasury securities onto the Stellar public blockchain, signaling growing institutional adoption of blockchain-based financial infrastructure.

The FDIC’s 2026 stablecoin AML proposal highlights growing global convergence on anti-money-laundering standards for digital payment issuers and crypto regulation.

CoinDCX’s refreshed 2026 crypto tax guide offers more than compliance advice. It reveals how India’s strict VDA tax regime, including the 30% tax, 1% TDS, and new GST burdens, is reshaping domestic crypto markets and driving trading activity offshore.

Project Crypto, launched by the SEC in 2026, signals a transition from enforcement-led crypto regulation toward structured frameworks for tokenised assets, including tokenised US equities traded on blockchain-based platforms.

The IMF’s 2026 working paper examines how stablecoins can remain safe and widely usable through reserve rules, central bank backing, and balanced regulatory incentives that support both stability and innovation.

Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) has introduced a comprehensive framework for crypto derivatives and virtual asset issuance, strengthening Dubai’s position as a global digital finance hub. The new rules focus on investor protection, risk management, stablecoin oversight, and clearer issuance standards while supporting innovation in tokenization and regulated digital asset markets.

Global financial institutions including JPMorgan and BlackRock are accelerating the adoption of tokenised finance, using blockchain infrastructure to enable faster settlement, programmable assets, and round-the-clock financial markets.

The UK Financial Conduct Authority has unveiled its roadmap for open finance, outlining plans to extend data-sharing frameworks from banking into broader financial services such as pensions, investments, insurance, and lending.

A 2026 report by the US Council of Economic Advisers argues that prohibiting yield on stablecoins would provide minimal support to bank lending while imposing costs on users and limiting innovation in digital finance.

Stablecoins are becoming a major component of digital finance, raising new policy questions about regulation, financial stability, and the future relationship between private digital money and sovereign currencies.

Institutional participation in digital asset markets is increasingly dependent on specialised custody infrastructure capable of securely storing and managing cryptocurrencies and tokenised assets. Banks and financial institutions are expanding custody services to meet the governance, compliance, and security requirements of regulated investors.

Central banks across major financial centres are increasingly testing tokenised sovereign bonds as part of broader efforts to modernise financial market infrastructure. Experiments in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the euro area explore how distributed ledger technology can support the issuance, settlement, and lifecycle management of government securities. While still in pilot stages, these initiatives signal a growing interest in programmable financial infrastructure and shared

As India approaches the Union Budget, the central constraint in digital finance reform is not funding but institutional readiness. This article examines why absorption capacity, regulatory coherence, and trusted infrastructure must precede large-scale investment in digital financial systems.

Tokenisation of real-world assets is advancing through pilots and regulatory sandboxes, yet large-scale adoption remains constrained by legal certainty and institutional design. This article explains why policy frameworks, authoritative registries, and trusted settlement architecture must precede market scale if tokenisation is to strengthen financial infrastructure.

As financial systems digitise and interconnect, weaknesses in data integrity and verification increasingly transmit systemic risk. This article examines how digital trust and authoritative registries are becoming central to financial stability, shifting the focus from post-crisis intervention to infrastructure-level resilience.

Climate finance continues to face credibility and coordination challenges despite growing volumes of data and reporting platforms. This article argues that authoritative and interoperable registries, rather than dashboards alone, are essential to establishing trust, traceability, and accountability across climate finance markets.

Cross-border payments remain costly and fragmented due to the absence of shared trust infrastructure across jurisdictions. This article argues that interoperable trust registries, rather than new payment rails alone, are essential to reducing friction and enabling scalable, accountable international payments.

As digital money moves from experimentation to policy reality, central bank digital currencies and stablecoins are increasingly viewed as complementary rather than competing instruments. This article examines how their coexistence depends less on instrument design and more on the trust infrastructure that connects monetary systems.