News, data and analysis on tokenized assets, market design and digital economic systems.
Hearings, conference sessions, papers and essays published by other people, catalogued with a note on why each one is here. Every entry links to the publisher, and everything in it is free to read or watch at the source.
Essay
Notable mainly for its tense. The IMF treats dollar-pegged tokens in Nigeria as an existing cross-border channel to be supervised rather than a prospect to be assessed, and sets the cost and speed gains against the monetary-control and supervision problem they create. We have read the framing rather than the full text, so this note stays at that level.
Publisher terms: By agreement
Paper
Tests the liquidity claim against onchain activity rather than issuance totals, across Treasury-backed, gold-backed and private-credit tokens on Ethereum. Two findings are worth carrying: the value of the underlying asset does not predict trading activity, and gold-backed tokens hold broader holder bases and more persistent activity than many Treasury and private-credit products. The turnover and active-address panels are built from public explorers, so the method can be checked.
Publisher terms: Non-commercial, attributed
Conference session
Held in Dakar, and the most substantial African central bank engagement with crypto-assets on the record: four panels running from stablecoins and monetary policy through prudential supervision and regional cooperation to central bank data protection, closing with a governors' roundtable spanning West Africa, Central Africa, Mauritius, Liberia, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe. A Federal Reserve governor gave the opening presentation, which is itself worth noting. Proceedings are in French.
Plays at the source: Banque Centrale des États de l'Afrique de l'Ouest does not permit its pages to be embedded elsewhere.
Publisher terms: By agreement · Captions unconfirmed
Paper
Reads the tokenised fund market as a familiar run problem in new plumbing. About €7bn globally and €725m domiciled in the EU, roughly doubled within a year, and none of the largest funds are fully onchain: assets and key processes sit off-chain, with a traditional book-entry ledger running alongside the token. The mismatches that matter are around-the-clock redemption against fixed fund cut-offs, settlement that synchronises redemptions instead of staggering them, token reuse as collateral building leverage, and dependence on a single stablecoin.
Publisher terms: By agreement
Paper
A narrow question with a large consequence: whether a token tracking an index is a transferable security or an asset-referenced token, which decides which of two very different EU regimes governs it. Wosiak proposes a two-level comparability test and concludes that most index tokens land on the securities side. Anyone building one in the EU is choosing between those regimes, sometimes without realising a choice is being made.
Publisher terms: Full text, attributed
Paper
The recording problem, stated plainly: property law does not treat a token as effective to convey land, so the token and the deed are two ledgers and the deed wins. About 30% of United States recording jurisdictions have no electronic recording at all, and those that do handle scanned images rather than records native to a chain, which leaves an unrecorded token holder losing to a later grantee holding paper. The constructive half is that a digital asset can be a deed where it meets the statutory elements and is properly recorded.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Hearing
Noticed with two discussion drafts rather than introduced bills, the Modernizing Markets Through Tokenization Act and the Capital Markets Technology Modernization Act, which is the stage at which drafting choices are still movable. SIFMA, DTCC and Nasdaq take the settlement and market-structure side, Plume Network the onchain side, and the questioning returns repeatedly to whether existing transfer-agent and custody rules can carry a token without amendment.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Paper
Empirical work on something usually asserted rather than measured: whether stablecoin flows move exchange rates. Four tokens across 27 currencies, and the findings are that crypto and conventional pricing hold persistent gaps, and that inflows depreciate the local currency and widen funding-cost premia. The transmission runs through balance-sheet-constrained intermediaries, which is the part to read closely.
Publisher terms: Excerpt and link
Paper
The largest calibration study on these venues so far, 292m trades across about 327,000 binary contracts on Kalshi and Polymarket, and the conclusion is that a price here is not a probability until it is adjusted. Horizon effects, domain biases and trade-size effects together account for 87.3% of the variance in calibration, political contracts sit chronically compressed toward 50%, and large trades amplify underconfidence on one venue and not the other, which points at microstructure rather than crowd psychology.
Publisher terms: Full text, attributed
Essay
Money in politics is the part of this industry's story that market data cannot show, and White does the unglamorous work of counting it: at least $288m committed ahead of the 2026 midterms, Fairshake holding $221m of it unspent, and a visible move away from the bipartisan posture of 2024. Read it as a register of who is being funded rather than as commentary.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Paper
Puts the choice between stablecoins and tokenized deposits inside the old narrow-banking model, where deposit insurance invites risk-shifting and regulation costs something to supply. The answer is conditional rather than directional: where regulatory costs are high and risk-shifting is limited, allowing tokenized deposits expands credit and raises welfare, and where regulation is cheap and risk-shifting is strong, confining the instrument to stablecoins is optimal and credit is what it costs. Letting both compete does best in the middle case.
Publisher terms: Full text, attributed
Paper
Fieldwork rather than theory, and the finding is one practitioners keep rediscovering: to function at all, a tokenised asset has to connect to existing infrastructures, regulations and intermediaries, and connecting reimposes exactly the gatekeeping tokenisation was meant to remove. Read it as an account of why pilots stall at the integration step. Openly licensed.
Publisher terms: Full text, attributed
Paper
Where tokenised property actually appears, on United States platform data from 2019 to 2025: in cheaper markets with weaker demand and thinner liquidity, and more of it where traditional credit is hard to get. On that evidence the gap being filled is a credit gap rather than a liquidity one. The uncomfortable finding is the disaster result, where trading volume rises about 35% within two days of a natural disaster, but only on platforms offering a buyback, which puts the platform's solvency behind the exit.
Publisher terms: Excerpt and link
Podcast
Two BIS economists take the definitional question slowly, which is the reason to start here rather than with a paper: what a token has to carry before it is anything more than a database row. The episode has no page of its own on the BIS site, so the date here comes from podcast directories rather than from the BIS.
Publisher terms: Excerpt and link
Panel
Two hours of central bank staff from the Philippines, Japan, Papua New Guinea and Fiji working through CBDC design and cross-border payments in economies where correspondent banking has been withdrawing rather than expanding. The Pacific Island cases are the reason to watch: the problem being solved there is access to any dollar rail at all, which is not the problem the reserve-currency debate describes. Built around the chapters of the IMF's CBDC Virtual Handbook.
Plays at the source: International Monetary Fund states no embedding terms, and an absent policy is not a permission.
Publisher terms: Split terms · Captions unconfirmed
Paper
The survey behind the numbers. About 91% of responding jurisdictions report minimal or tightly restricted use, and roughly $10bn of tokenised bond issuance has accumulated over a decade against a $140tn global bond market. Issuance and distribution are largely unchanged, secondary trading still happens on traditional venues, and participants keep choosing traditional settlement despite the speed argument. Where it finds real traction is servicing: digital custody and intraday collateral mobility.
Publisher terms: Excerpt and link
Paper
The most useful available corrective to a US-centred reading of stablecoin demand: over 80% of transactions occur outside the United States, and the top quartile of adopters is Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, Türkiye and the UAE. In sub-Saharan Africa the authors put stablecoins at around 43% of transaction volume. The Treasury-market argument follows from that geography rather than preceding it.
Publisher terms: By agreement
Conference session
Waller opened and closed a day the Board built almost entirely out of practitioners rather than staff economists, so the panels are unusually concrete about what breaks in production. The stablecoin session is the one to watch for the payments case made by firms actually settling on it, and the closing panel covers tokenised funds and collateral with BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and JPMorgan's Kinexys. Per-panel transcripts sit on the Board's media server but are not linked from the conference page, so we link one here.
Transcript at federalreserve.gov
Publisher terms: Full text · transcript linked below
Column
Eichengreen grants the premise that dollar primacy faces a demand problem, then refuses the proposed remedy. His objection is that reserve status rests on deep, liquid safe-asset markets and the institutions maintaining them, none of which token issuance creates. Short, and from the economic historian whose account of dollar primacy most of the competing arguments are borrowing from.
Publisher terms: By agreement
Essay
Written from inside the institutional-reform debate rather than the crypto one, and pointed about the gap it identifies: supply near $300bn and still accelerating while most member countries have no framework to supervise it. The recommendation is that the IMF and World Bank get ahead of this through surveillance, technical assistance and standard-setting instead of arriving after the first failure.
Publisher terms: Non-commercial, attributed
Roundtable
The first time the two agencies sat in one room to work through which of them regulates what. The value is in panel one, where J. Christopher Giancarlo walks back through how the split arose, and in panel two, where Polymarket and Kalshi appear alongside CME, Cboe and ICE and the event-contract boundary gets argued directly rather than in comment letters. This file covers opening remarks and panel one; the later panels were published separately. The two agencies' own pages disagree on when the session ended, so we have not printed a finish time.
Publisher terms: Full text
Panel
An unusual spread of seats at one table: the Bank of England's payments director, the digital currency institute of the People's Bank of China, the private banks' trade body and an academic who has spent a decade modelling settlement. Ingves chairs it firmly enough that the disagreements surface, particularly on whether the correspondent network is itself the problem or the compliance load riding on it.
Publisher terms: Excerpt and link
Conference session
The clearest short account of Agorá from the BIS itself: 8 central banks, 5 of them issuing major reserve currencies, and over 40 financial institutions building shared infrastructure for tokenised correspondent banking. One thing to listen for is the vocabulary, which has moved since the recording. The 2025 programme called it a multi-currency unified ledger; the project page now says multi-currency shared programmable platform, which is the narrower claim.
Publisher terms: Excerpt and link
Conference session
Three innovation-hub heads account for what their public-sector tokenisation projects actually produced, Genesis, Pine and Promissa among them. Worth the time as a corrective to pilot announcements: the interesting passages are where each says what the prototype did not resolve.
Publisher terms: Excerpt and link
Essay
The fiscal channel the payments-efficiency case tends to leave out. Gupta argues that dollar token adoption in sub-Saharan Africa erodes seigniorage and the tax base at the same time, while the reserves backing those tokens generate demand for short-term US government debt. A transfer, in other words, and he is explicit about its direction.
Publisher terms: Non-commercial, attributed
Paper
Prices that contradict each other across related contracts turn out to have been harvested rather than merely observed. The authors reconstruct Polymarket order-book history and estimate about $40m of profit extracted, through rebalancing within a single market and combinatorial arbitrage across related ones. Read it for how a prediction market actually clears, against the account of how its prices are supposed to aggregate belief.
Publisher terms: By agreement
Paper
Sets out four architectures a stablecoin can take, then runs five geopolitical scenarios across them, which is a more disciplined structure than the single-scenario forecast this literature usually offers. The conditional matters more than the headline: well-regulated fully reserved tokens can outpace central bank digital currency rollouts, but only where reserve integrity, bankruptcy-remote consumer protection and programmable compliance are actually delivered. Openly licensed.
Publisher terms: Full text, attributed
Press conference
The briefing at which the BIS set out its three tests for money, singleness, elasticity and integrity, and said stablecoins perform poorly against all three. Shin and Maechler are presenting an annual report chapter rather than speaking off the cuff, so this is the argument in its authorised form, and it is the source most central bank staff will reach for when pushing back on a stablecoin proposal.
Publisher terms: Excerpt and link
Essay
The most practical piece in this catalogue on a question usually answered in the abstract: what happens to the rest of the financial system depending on what sits behind the token. Five backings, five distinct failure modes, from narrow banking under central bank reserves through bill-supply strain and repo coupling to run-prone funding concentrated in a handful of crypto-servicing banks. Keep it beside any reserve-composition rule you are reading.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Paper
The taxonomy to reach for when a tokenisation claim needs testing, because it keys on the only question that decides anything: what legal relationship the token bears to the thing it represents. Complete tokenisation, whether direct or indirect, carries enforceable rights; incomplete tokenisation is a digital twin with little legal effect. Transferability, legal certainty and composability all follow from which of the two you are holding. Openly licensed.
Publisher terms: Full text, attributed
Roundtable
The afternoon the SEC put tokenisation advocates and their sharpest critics on the same two panels, which is why it remains the most useful single recording on the subject. Panel one is the industry case for moving securities settlement onchain, from Nasdaq, DTCC, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Apollo. Panel two is where Hilary Allen and Angela Walch press the legal-effect question most tokenisation pitches leave unanswered. The recording here is the first of two files and covers the keynote and panel one.
Publisher terms: Full text
Panel
A rare panel where the BIS, the ECB, the Reserve Bank of Australia and the architect of India's identity stack answer the same question in sequence, so the differences in what each means by tokenisation become audible. Carstens and Cipollone argue from unified-ledger and digital-euro positions respectively; Nilekani's answer comes from public digital infrastructure instead, and is the one least like the others.
Plays at the source: International Monetary Fund states no embedding terms, and an absent policy is not a permission.
Publisher terms: Split terms · Captions unconfirmed
Essay
The clearest short explanation of why a sanctions designation does not stop a designated exchange from moving dollar tokens: issuers vet who they mint to and redeem from, and almost nobody vets the transfers in between. Koning follows roughly $20bn of Tether through Garantex after its 2022 designation and out the other side into Grinex. Useful because it locates the control point precisely, which most coverage does not.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Roundtable
Four modules that between them cover most of what has to be settled before a clearing house can hold a token as margin: custody and delivery of digital assets, round-the-clock trading, direct clearing without an intermediating member, and vertical integration. The full official transcript is published, so passages here can be located and checked rather than paraphrased.
Publisher terms: Unstated · transcript linked below
Paper
A Lido case study with an uncomfortable finding: encoding accountability onchain does not distribute it, it makes it zero-sum between stakeholder groups, and the group most reliably excluded is end users. The authors conclude that workable governance has to keep some decisions off-chain, which cuts against the premise of most governance token designs.
Publisher terms: Full text, attributed
Essay
Written by a then serving deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria about the eNaira, which makes it the closest thing available to an insider account of an African central bank digital currency launch. It credits faster inclusion and lower cash-handling costs, names disintermediation, cyberattack, operational disruption and privacy as the risks, and ends with six implementation lessons that read as having been learned the hard way.
Publisher terms: By agreement
Hearing
The earlier of the committee's two tokenisation hearings, and useful as a baseline: it was noticed with the Tokenization Report Act, a bill that only asked regulators to study the question. Securitize and DTCC Digital Assets set out what existed in 2024, Sidley Austin the securities-law fit and Hilary Allen the case against, so the distance travelled by 2026 can be measured against it.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Essay
The pricing argument behind blob fees, stated generally: when a system constrains several resources independently but charges for them through one meter, it gives up throughput in proportion to the number of resources while simultaneously admitting unsafe blocks and rejecting safe ones. Blob pricing was the first place this was fixed rather than argued, and the piece sets out why storage access is the next candidate. The clearest short case for treating fee design as market design.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Essay
Swartz treats money as a technology for making claims about the future, then asks what future retail crypto investing was selling. The useful construct is the network scam: a structure that needs collective enthusiasm to work at all while distributing its payoffs radically unevenly, which describes a good deal more than outright fraud. Not a policy piece, and better for it.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Paper
Read this next to any paper claiming decentralised finance removes intermediaries. Allen traces the specific mechanisms that made pre-2008 shadow banking fragile (maturity transformation, collateral rehypothecation, procyclical leverage) and shows each reproduced onchain with less slack in the system rather than more. The regulatory conclusion is precautionary and unfashionable: firewall it from the regulated core instead of integrating it.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Essay
Proposes three tests an organisation would have to pass to earn a liability shield: decisions and transactions auditable on a public chain, no single participant holding concentrated governance power, and governance rights confined to active participants, with investment tokens issued separately on the preferred-stock analogy. The third test is the substantive one, and he concedes there is no verification machinery for it yet.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Essay
A demolition of the proposal that giving stablecoin issuers access to the Federal Reserve's overnight reverse repo facility would make their tokens materially safer. The objection is operational rather than ideological: an overnight position cannot be unwound intraday to meet redemptions, and the central bank has no intention of standing behind token holders. Worth keeping because the same proposal keeps returning in new clothes.
Publisher terms: Full text, attributed
Essay
Four limits that cryptoeconomic governance cannot design its way out of, argued by someone who works on cooperative governance rather than against it. The sharpest is the first: with no way to verify a unique person, one token one vote is the only available franchise, so plutocracy is not a failure mode but the resting state. His prescription is not to abandon the machinery but to envelope it inside older political forms that can carry what tokens cannot.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Paper
Tests the claim that owning a token means owning the thing against actual property doctrine, and finds the link mostly absent. The evidence is the useful part: a systematic review of major platforms' terms of service showing how far the legal effect falls short of the marketing. Written about non-fungible tokens, but the reasoning transfers directly to any tokenised claim.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Essay
A reply to the Schneider essay also catalogued here, and it concedes most of the diagnosis: plutocracy, blindness to motive, blindness to externalities. The disagreement is about where the fault sits. Buterin relocates it to collusion, defining finance as the patterns that emerge wherever a system does not attempt to prevent collusion, and arrives close to Schneider's conclusion by another route: the machinery holds only when anchored inside layers that are deliberately not financialised.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Paper
Reframes the stablecoin question as an old one: most of the US money supply has always been privately issued, and the law has always had to decide which private promises get to be money. Awrey's contribution is to show that the newer issuers operate under money-transmitter and trust charters never built to carry that load, without the capital, supervision and backstops that make a bank deposit credible. The proposed National Money Act is the constructive half.
Publisher terms: Unstated
Paper
The inversion to read before accepting that a public digital currency would disintermediate banks. Grey argues deposit flight into central bank money is an opportunity: let banks fund loans through collateralised overdrafts in digital legal tender, and the state's existing role in credit creation becomes explicit rather than hidden behind deposit insurance. The date here comes from the author's own publications listing; the file carries none.
Publisher terms: Unstated
No entry matches every filter at once. Clear one to widen the view.
Watch. Hearings, roundtables and conference sessions, played in this page when the publisher permits it.
Listen. Podcast episodes and recorded briefings.
Read. Papers, essays and columns published elsewhere.
11 of these recordings play in this page. None of them contacts the host that serves it until you press the cue bar, and the bar names that host before you do.
Where a publisher withholds or has never stated embedding terms, there is no player and the entry says so. An absent policy is not a permission.
Someone on the desk read or watched it. The note is written from that, not from the publisher's abstract, and it says what the piece establishes rather than what it is about.
Inclusion is not endorsement, and a catalogued argument is not one this publication holds. Where we think a piece is wrong and still worth reading, the note says both.
What issued, what settled, what the supervisors changed, with the numbers behind it and a note on what the numbers do not show. One email, Thursday mornings.
Unsubscribe in one click.