UK sets 12-month deadline to launch tokenized wholesale markets
A UK Treasury-backed report has laid out a 12-month plan to move tokenized repo, gilts and funds onto live markets, signaling a shift from sandbox experiments to production-grade infrastructure in a bid to secure £33 billion in annual economic gains.
The UK Treasury’s wholesale digital markets champion, Chris Woolard, has proposed transitioning tokenized repo, fixed income and funds from regulatory sandboxes to live trading within the next year. The report warns that the UK risks losing out if industry standards and liquidity migrate to other jurisdictions first.
The push is driven by significant projected macroeconomic benefits. Woolard’s task force estimates that moving wholesale markets onchain could increase annual economic output by £33 billion ($44 billion) and boost tax revenues by £14 billion annually within a decade.
To achieve this, the report advocates a hybrid blockchain architecture. It suggests using permissionless networks for common liquidity, layered beneath permissioned institutional networks. However, it flags that chain reorganizations on public blockchains create settlement-finality risks that do not exist in traditional market infrastructure. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, built on Ethereum with a Securitize compliance wrapper, is cited as a working example of this hybrid approach.
The report explicitly positions crypto-native firms as essential infrastructure partners rather than disruptive outsiders. Ripple is highlighted as a primary model of this convergence, stemming from its $1.25 billion acquisition of prime broker Hidden Road. Now operating as Ripple Prime, the firm holds both an investment-firm license and a cryptoasset registration from the Financial Conduct Authority covering spot and derivatives. The report also notes Santander UK’s use of Ripple’s rails for white-labeled cross-border payments.
On regulation, Woolard places the UK and the US on similar timelines for stablecoin frameworks, with full regimes expected in 2027. Yet the UK holds a clear lead in wholesale digital asset policy compared to the stalled Clarity Act in the US. The FCA will begin accepting applications under the Financial Services and Markets Act on September 30, 2025, ahead of the regime's October 2027 launch.
Despite the aggressive timeline, the industry remains wary of regulatory speed. The report concedes that firms still perceive UK authorization as slower than the US, pointing to a December 2025 SEC no-action letter that allows the Depository Trust Company to run a live tokenization pilot rather than a constrained test environment.
