Driving public blockchain integration in banking

Written by Lewis McLellan, Digital Monetary Institute editor, OMFIF

The integration of public blockchains into regulated financial infrastructure marks an epochal transition fraught with policy challenges, technical breakthroughs and a continual re-negotiation of trust and control. The last five years have seen blockchain mature from an experimental infrastructure into viable components of mainstream finance. Tokenisation, the digital representation of real-world assets on chain, is not mere theory. Institutional funds such as Franklin Templeton’s on-chain US Government Money Fund and Apollo’s ACRED credit token now anchor their market activity on public blockchains such as Aptos and Ripple’s XRPL. Citi predicts the tokenisation of up to $5 trillion in assets by 2030, a market shift echoed by McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group. Yet the promise is held back by regulatory inertia and a technical bias against open, permissionless blockchains - viewed as risky by institutions facing punitive capital requirements. Basel’s SCO60 rules treat freely accessi…