UK has recruited BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley into a 54-firm taskforce designed to turn tokenized wholesale finance from isolated pilots into functioning markets. Led by Wholesale Digital Markets Champion Chris Woolard and supported by the City of London Corporation, the program will spend 12 months developing live use cases. The initiative places institutional execution ahead of another round of blockchain experimentation, beginning with tokenized repurchase agreements and extending across issuance, collateral, funds and payment rails. The ambition is striking: tokenization could add roughly $44 billion to annual UK economic output by 2035 if adoption reaches scale nationally.
Taskforce targets complete market infrastructure
The taskforce is organized around nine action groups covering primary issuance, secondary markets, collateral, financial market infrastructure and the cash leg, alongside tax, law, financial crime, identity, resilience and communications. Members range from asset managers and banks to exchanges, custodians, stablecoin companies and blockchain developers. This breadth recognizes that tokenization fails when one segment modernizes alone. A digital security cannot deliver efficiencies if settlement money, legal ownership, compliance records and legacy systems remain operationally disconnected. The first tokenized repo trial will therefore test an entire transaction chain rather than demonstrate another asset moving impressively inside a controlled environment, however polished.
Woolard’s roadmap builds on projects already under way, including the Digital Gilt Instrument pilot, the Digital Securities Sandbox, tokenized fund initiatives and the Great British Tokenised Deposit project. The report argues that these foundations now require permanent commercial pathways rather than endless sandbox residency. The decisive challenge is moving regulated experiments into markets with durable liquidity. Government and regulators are asked to provide clearer timelines, legal certainty, tax neutrality and routes from testing into steady-state supervision. Firms, meanwhile, must invest in interoperable infrastructure capable of operating across distributed ledgers and conventional systems without fragmenting assets, collateral or access across markets.
Economic promise comes with execution risk
The economic projection explains the urgency. Official estimates say tokenization could increase UK annual output by up to £33 billion, approximately $44 billion, and generate £14 billion in yearly tax revenue by 2035. Globally, tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion, or about 16% of investable assets, by then. Those figures describe an opportunity, not a guaranteed dividend. They depend on the UK remaining a leading jurisdiction, international tokenization expanding rapidly and domestic adoption keeping pace with major competitors. The promised gains also presume lower reconciliation costs, better collateral mobility, faster settlement and new revenues consistently exceeding overall transition expenses.
The roadmap acknowledges risks beneath its optimistic arithmetic. Liquidity could splinter across incompatible networks, firms may run digital and legacy systems simultaneously for years, and cross-border activity could collide with divergent rules. Standards, cyber resilience and financial crime controls must therefore develop alongside commercial products. The taskforce is ultimately a test of whether Britain can coordinate faster than financial infrastructure fragments. BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley bring scale and market influence, but participation does not create adoption. Success will be measured by live transactions, reusable standards and whether tokenized markets become cheaper and operationally safer than existing rails.