The article argues that by 2025 digital assets had exceeded critical mass and become an accepted part of the global financial system, with distributed ledger technology shifting from experimentation to implementation across markets. A series of legislative and regulatory milestones in 2025 in the USA, UK, EU, UAE, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and at Basel are presented as having laid down the foundations and tempo for 2026. The authors describe legal and regulatory uncertainty as the biggest blocker to wider distributed ledger technology adoption, citing surveys that report that it is holding back more than 50% of firms in collateral tokenisation and that regulation was the top tokenisation concern for 73% of respondents, and they stress that updated, technology positive and technology neutral regulation is now seen by both traditional finance and digital natives as crucial to unlocking the sector’s development.
The piece expects 2026 to be dominated by efforts to implement and refine major frameworks such as the UK’s cryptoasset regime, the EU’s Market Integration Package and the USA’s CLARITY Act, alongside ongoing use by the SEC, CFTC and other agencies of existing powers to support digital asset trading. A central theme is the “digital plumbing” of financial markets, where the move to distributed ledger based infrastructure raises interoperability, standard setting and “walled garden” fragmentation risks as private blockchains used by traditional finance meet public chains favoured by digital natives. The article highlights EU proposals for interoperability standards and a Central Securities Depositaries hub and spoke model, and notes that 2026 work by regulators and trade associations will focus on ensuring that new digital rails can interact effectively with legacy systems, including for stablecoin driven on and off ramps and cross border settlement of USD denominated payments.
In digital securities, money and payments, the authors see the cash leg of on chain transactions, and the broader “multi moneyverse” of stablecoins, central bank digital currency and tokenised deposits, as key areas to watch. They predict challenges to the dominance of stablecoins in 2026, further developments in central bank digital currency following the UAE’s initiative, and a stronger Bank of England digital push through the renewed RTGS service, alongside potential solutions to the bilateral limitations of tokenised deposits and the UK government’s fully on chain sovereign debt pilot. The article also points to intense competition in digital payments, where incumbents, challengers and digital natives are extending stablecoin and wallet offerings, and where EU payment regulation is designed to dovetail with Markets in Crypto assets rules. On tokenisation, it cites research describing tokenisation as a megatrend, with collateral and funds leading current use cases, and states that tokenisation is estimated to generate aggregate savings of USD135 billion across the UK, EU and US funds industry and immediate yearly savings of USD346 million per Tier 1 firm, while the real world asset tokenisation market is conservatively estimated to reach USD1.5-2 trillion by 2030 and USD3-4 trillion by 2035.
The authors expect collaboration and mergers and acquisitions between traditional finance and digital natives to deepen in the short to medium term, moving beyond service and outsourcing models such as Ripple’s custody for BBVA and BBVA’s support for Binance, towards material transactions similar to those between early internet providers and traditional media. Turning to Artificial Intelligence, the article notes that 2025 was widely labelled the year of Artificial Intelligence, with both hype and concerns about an Artificial Intelligence bubble and “Artificial Intelligence slop”, yet argues that the technology is here to stay and will increasingly combine with distributed ledger technology. In 2026, they foresee financial services firms leaning into Artificial Intelligence agents, including Artificial Intelligence powered payment agents, and scaling Artificial Intelligence use from pilots to workflows in areas such as fraud prevention, anti money laundering, know your customer and counter terrorist financing. The article also emphasises that 2026 will bring further developments in currently fragmented international Artificial Intelligence law and regulation, raising the question of whether divergent approaches can be smoothed into more harmonised frameworks.
On data protection, the authors describe a structural tension between decentralisation and immutability on distributed ledgers and core data protection concepts in EU and UK law, including data minimisation, the right to be forgotten, rectification, international transfers, automated decision making and purpose limitation. They note that the European Data Protection Board issued Guidelines in 2025 and that the UK Information Commissioner’s Office published distributed ledger technology guidance that explores differential privacy techniques to anonymise data, but both acknowledge significant challenges in reconciling putting personal data on distributed ledgers with privacy by design and by default obligations. They expect 2026 to bring finalised guidance and hope for more innovative regulatory thinking. The article concludes that 2026 will be the year of mainstream distributed ledger technology use cases, with digital assets no longer niche and financial institutions that have not yet assessed distributed ledger technology’s competitive implications urged to make this a priority in early 2026.
