The International Monetary Fund has issued one of its most direct endorsements yet of tokenization’s potential to reshape traditional finance, arguing that moving assets, settlement, and recordkeeping onto shared ledgers could dramatically shorten today’s typically multi-day settlement cycles.

In a blog post published Thursday, Tobias Adrian—financial counselor and director of the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department—stated that tokenization should be viewed as more than a niche crypto concept. He also cautioned that the same shift that could improve efficiency may move critical financial risk away from familiar intermediaries and toward the underlying infrastructure, including smart contracts, distributed ledgers, and the service providers that operate them.

Key takeaways

• The IMF argues tokenization can streamline settlement and recordkeeping by using shared ledgers, potentially reducing multi-day processes to near-instant transactions.
• Adrian warns that tokenization changes the location of risk, with vulnerabilities potentially shifting from banks and brokers to blockchain and infrastructure layers.
• The IMF highlights a regulatory gap: without common standards and coordinated oversight, tokenized markets could fragment across incompatible platforms.
• Market institutions are already preparing for tokenized finance, with major players reportedly working on tokenized deposit infrastructure.
• U.S. regulators are moving to apply existing securities rules to tokenized assets while discussing potential experimental pathways.

Why the IMF’s stance matters for tokenized markets

The IMF’s position is notable because it frames tokenization as an architectural change to how financial markets function, not simply a technological upgrade. Adrian’s central claim is structural: when the same system handles asset representation, transfers, settlement, and recordkeeping, the industry can reduce operational handoffs that currently add time and friction.

That “compressed settlement” argument is a key reason tokenization attracts attention from both technology teams and incumbent financial institutions. In practical terms, shorter settlement windows can support faster settlement finality, reduce certain operational dependencies, and improve liquidity dynamics by making transfers easier to complete.

Risk migration and the standards problem

Alongside the efficiency thesis, Adrian introduced a counterweight: tokenization may shift where systemic risk lives. In traditional setups, intermediaries play a dominant role in managing settlement and operational dependencies. With tokenized infrastructure, Adrian argued that risks can move toward the underlying technology stack—smart contracts, distributed ledger mechanics, and the organizations providing related services.

He further warned that if regulators and industry participants do not establish common standards and coordinate regulation, tokenized markets could splinter. Fragmentation across incompatible platforms would not just create inconvenience; it could also introduce new forms of systemic risk by increasing complexity and reducing transparency around how assets move and settle in different ecosystems.

This is where the IMF’s message goes beyond general technology optimism. Tokenization can only deliver its promise if networks interoperate safely and if the governance, compliance expectations, and operational controls are consistent enough to support market-wide confidence.

Institutional momentum: tokenized deposits and broader research

The IMF’s comments arrive as traditional finance accelerates its own tokenization programs. Earlier coverage from The Clearing House—a payments and banking group whose owners include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Barclays—has been reported as planning a tokenized deposit network in early 2027. The reported goal is to keep deposits within the regulated banking system while enabling faster, programmable payment flows.

The IMF’s thinking also aligns with research highlighted by the report’s surrounding context. According to PwC research, tokenization could address long-running inefficiencies in traditional finance, including payment settlement and the transfer of asset ownership. In addition, a May report from Moody’s pointed to growing preparations among traditional institutions for a shift toward tokenized finance.

Taken together, these threads suggest tokenization is moving from concept to execution inside mainstream institutions—making the IMF’s emphasis on standards and coordinated regulation more urgent, not less.

Regulators trying to define tokenized finance in real time

A major theme in Adrian’s post is that policymakers have a narrow window to influence how tokenized markets develop. He argued that key design choices—such as what settlement assets are used, how governance works, whether interoperability is supported, and what role central banks should play—will largely determine whether tokenization improves system performance or adds systemic fragility.

In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission has taken steps to clarify how existing securities laws apply to tokenized assets rather than building a completely separate framework. The debate also includes potential mechanisms for supervised experimentation, with Cointelegraph noting that the SEC has signaled it is considering an “innovation exemption” that could allow market participants to test blockchain-based trading platforms for tokenized securities while a broader regulatory approach is developed.

For market participants, this matters because the regulatory path influences product design and compliance strategy. Tokenized markets are not only software deployments; they also require durable interpretations of custody, disclosure, trading conduct, and market structure rules—especially as assets migrate from legacy rails to programmable settlement systems.

As institutions push forward with tokenized network initiatives and regulators work through existing laws and possible pilot pathways, the next phase to watch is whether industry standards and interoperability efforts keep pace—because the IMF’s warning about fragmentation is likely to become the deciding factor between tokenization becoming a mainstream efficiency upgrade or a patchwork of systems with rising operational and systemic risk.

The Solana Foundation, the Swiss organization that supports the Solana network’s development, launched a new framework for protocol-level governance that enables proposing and voting on governance decisions for the Solana blockchain. 

The Solana Governance Proposals (SGPs) establish a standard that enables validators to submit core protocol proposals and vote onchain, with voting power based on their delegated Solana (SOL) stake, the Foundation announced in a Thursday X post.

“An SGP captures a stake-weighted directional decision. It records what the community wants. It is not strictly focused on the technical detail of how to build the feature,” according to the GitHub repository, launched on Thursday.

The new framework offers Solana a transparent, community-driven way to make major protocol decisions, reducing reliance on centralized coordination while keeping technical implementations, or Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs), separate from community governance. 

Other blockchain networks with similar stake-weighted governance mechanisms include Polkadot, Cosmos, Cardano, Tezos and Avalanche.

Source: Solana Foundation on X.com

Proposals require minimum 15% support

A proposal must receive endorsements from validators representing at least 15% of actively staked Solana tokens to qualify for a formal onchain vote, a measure that seeks to filter out low-quality proposals.

Validators with at least 100,000 SOL delegated can open a new governance proposal via SGP. SOL stakers can delegate their stake to validators, allowing them to participate in the governance process on their behalf.

Delegators who disagree with how their validator has voted can now override the validator and submit their own vote on the proposal, hence overriding the validator’s vote for that proposal.

SGP voting information, minimum threshold. Source: GitHub

The Solana Foundation said that governance-level proposals will be SGPs, while smaller SIMD proposals will focus on technical protocol upgrades.

“SIMDs should focus on protocol changes, SGPs should be signals from the ecosystem,” wrote the Foundation. 

Related: South Korea’s Shinhan Card taps Solana to test real-world stablecoin payments

In April, the Solana Foundation introduced a new security auditing framework and incident-response network for Solana-based protocols, in partnership with Web3 security firm Asymmetric Research.

The new initiative, the Solana Trust, Resilience and Infrastructure for DeFi Enterprises (STRIDE), is a “structured program for evaluating, monitoring and escalating security across Solana projects,” according to the April announcement.

Top blockchain networks by TVL. Source: DefiLlama

Solana ranks as the second-largest blockchain network with $4.92 billion in total value locked (TVL), behind Ethereum’s $37.3 billion. Solana generated over $587,000 in blockchain fees during the past 24 hours, according to DefiLlama at last look.

Magazine: ‘If you want to be great, make enemies’: Solana economist Max Resnick

Kash Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) , reportedly omitted reporting exposure to Bitcoin treasury company Strategy, in violation of federal law.

According to a Wednesday report from the nonpartisan nonprofit news agency NOTUS, Patel “inadvertently omitted” a Strategy (MSTR) investment worth as much as $250,000. The purchase, which Patel conducted on Nov. 21, 2025, wasn’t included in his December 2025 financial disclosures, as required for a government official under the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act.

Source: NOTUS

Patel filed an amended report on May 26, indicating that the Strategy holdings were “inadvertently omitted” and “no current conflict exists” with the investment. Under the STOCK Act, some government officials and lawmakers must disclose financial transactions exceeding $1,000 no later than 45 days after executing the trade. Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, is a registered US government contractor, raising concerns about conflicts of interest with Patel’s investments.

Although signed into law in 2012, the STOCK Act has come under fire from many in Congress who claim that lawmakers and White House officials who violate it do not face severe penalties. First-time violators are only subject to a $200 fine under the law, with additional penalties falling short of the hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars offered in disclosures.

Related: Apple fixes bug that allowed FBI to read deleted Signal messages

Patel isn’t the only member of Congress or policymaker to fall behind in his Strategy investment disclosures. According to Capitol Trades, a website tracking politicians’ investments, Representative Shri Thanedar waited until August 2025 to report a $15,001 to $50,000 investment in Strategy made in June 2024.

Trump discloses $1.4 billion in crypto-related income

The FBI director’s reported late disclosures came in the wake of President Donald Trump’s release of financial records that revealed that his cryptocurrency ventures generated more than $1.4 billion in income in 2025, exceeding that of his real estate businesses.

Many US lawmakers have criticized the president for profiting from his position while in office through his memecoin launch, his family’s crypto platform World Liberty Financial, and his sons’ Bitcoin mining venture.

Magazine: Big Questions: Do we really only need 2–5 cryptocurrencies?

The launch of the Ripple-backed Open USD (OUSD) stablecoin has been overshadowed by a suspected fake issuer account that XRP Ledger validators have warned users not to trust.

Validators say the listed OUSD issuer cannot be verified

According to XRP Ledger validator operator GrimmReaper, a transaction-monitoring tool connected to his validator recently detected a newly activated issuer using the “Open Standard” name on the XRP Ledger, prompting him to investigate whether it was linked to the newly launched OUSD stablecoin.

GrimmReaper shared a screenshot from Bithomp showing the account, which included the website joinopenstandard.netlify.app and a recently activated XRP Ledger address.

Posting the image on X, he asked fellow XRPL validators Krippenreiter and Vet whether the issuer appeared legitimate. He later explained that his monitoring software tracks incoming validator transactions and automatically flags newly created token issuers using specific names.

The account also displayed advertisements such as “Earn 12% on XRP” and “Play Slots and win 70,000 XRP.” While those ads are not issued by the account itself, they appeared alongside the Bithomp page shown in GrimmReaper’s screenshot and were highlighted as common themes frequently associated with cryptocurrency scams.

Responding to the post, XRPL dUNL validator Vet urged users to assume the issuer was fraudulent until official confirmation was provided by the Open USD project.

According to Vet, a legitimate token issuer should provide what he described as a “2 way pointer,” where the issuer address links to the project’s official website and the project independently publishes the same issuer address. Vet said those verification steps were absent in this case, adding that users should not trust any issuer without confirmation from both sides.

The warning comes as the XRP Ledger community is already discussing issues reported after the rollout of the network’s v3.2.0 upgrade, with validators continuing to monitor suspicious activity across the ecosystem.

OUSD enters a competitive stablecoin market

Open Standard officially launched the OUSD stablecoin on June 30, introducing a revenue-sharing model backed by more than 140 companies. The consortium includes Ripple, Visa, Mastercard, BNY, Standard Chartered, BlackRock, Google, Shopify, Coinbase and Solana.

According to the consortium, OUSD allows businesses to mint and redeem the stablecoin without fees or minimum volume requirements. It also plans to distribute reserve-generated income to participating partners after deducting a management fee, while governance responsibilities will be shared across consortium members.

Ripple’s participation as a founding member has drawn attention from the XRP community, making the project a high-profile target for impersonation attempts shortly after launch.

The stablecoin’s debut has also influenced financial markets. Circle Internet Group shares fell more than 17% on July 1 after investors reacted to the launch of OUSD and its revenue-sharing model, which introduces another institutional-focused competitor in the stablecoin sector.

Circle Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Allaire dismissed suggestions that OUSD poses a major threat to USDC, saying the stablecoin market is large enough to support multiple successful issuers. Still, the decline in Circle’s share price indicated that investors are closely watching how new distribution and revenue-sharing structures could affect competition as stablecoin adoption continues to expand.

Russia’s central bank governor, Elvira Nabiullina, confirmed that the country was prepared to roll out its central bank digital currency (CBDC) in two months, following the timeline it laid out last year. 

According to a Thursday report from Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti, Nabiullina said that “everyone is ready” for a Sept. 1 digital ruble launch. The CBDC will launch as a complement to Russia’s fiat currency, the ruble, and will initially be accepted by financial and credit institutions.

“We want the digital ruble to be in demand by people and businesses, to be convenient, and, of course, we’re constantly discussing […] what functionality to develop,” said Nabiullina in a translated statement.

Pile of 5000 ruble banknotes next to a keyboard on a white surface, viewed from above. Source: Polina Tankilevitch, Pexels

The launch of a digital ruble, whose development began in 2021, has already been targeted by preemptive sanctions from European Union authorities, which announced restrictions on the CBDC in April. The European Council said that the sanctions package was in response to Russia’s “war of aggression against Ukraine,” which it started in February 2022.

According to the Bank of Russia’s first deputy governor, Vladimir Chistyukhin, the law allowing the digital ruble will be enacted on Sept. 1 with a transition period until July 2027.

Related: Russia targets British 17-year-old for alleging digital assets were skirting sanctions

Dr. Jack Jarmon, who worked as a USAID technical adviser for the Russian government in the 1990s, said in a February 2025 report that the country could face “structural limitations” should its digital ruble plans fail and it relies on Bitcoin (BTC) and other proof-of-work (PoW) digital currencies as methods of evading sanctions.

“While Russia is replete with a surplus of oil and gas, the rest of its energy infrastructure is not well suited to handle such significant increases in demand for energy,” said Jarmon, referring to PoW mining. “Its power grid is old and in need of investment and upgrade.”

He added:

“The sanctions that Putin seeks to circumvent have cut Russia off from financial capital and technology. It has no domestic semiconductor industry to meet its needs and must rely on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for components […]”

US President weighing legislation with four-year CBDC ban

In contrast to Russia, the United States is one step away from having a ban on the country’s central bank issuing or creating a CBDC until 2030. This week, US President Donald Trump received the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a housing bill containing a ban on a digital dollar as part of a package of housing affordability laws.

Although Trump has said he will not sign the bill, expecting Republicans to first pass legislation requiring voters to provide proof of US citizenship in person to register, it will automatically become law in 10 days with no action on the president’s part. This timeline would put the law into effect in July. 

Magazine: Big Questions: Do we really only need 2–5 cryptocurrencies?

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says tokenization could fundamentally reshape how financial markets operate, marking one of the strongest acknowledgments yet from a global policymaker that blockchain-based infrastructure is moving into the financial mainstream.

In a blog published Thursday, Tobias Adrian, the IMF’s financial counselor and director of its Monetary and Capital Markets Department, said tokenization is more than a niche crypto innovation. By bringing assets, settlement and recordkeeping onto a shared ledger, tokenization could compress today’s multi-day settlement process into near-instant transactions.

Adrian also warned that tokenization shifts risks away from traditional financial intermediaries and toward the underlying infrastructure, including smart contracts, distributed ledgers and service providers. Without common standards and coordinated regulation, tokenized financial markets could become fragmented across incompatible platforms, creating new sources of systemic risk.

Source: IMF

The report comes as financial institutions accelerate efforts to integrate tokenization into traditional markets. The Clearing House, whose owners include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Barclays, reportedly plans to launch a tokenized deposit network in early 2027 to keep deposits within the regulated banking system while enabling faster, programmable payments.

The IMF’s assessment aligns with recent research from PwC, which found that tokenization could address longstanding inefficiencies in traditional finance, including payment settlement and the transfer of asset ownership. It also follows a May report from Moody’s showing that traditional financial institutions are actively preparing for a shift toward tokenized finance. 

Related: Tokenization makes finance more efficient but introduces risks: IMF

Regulators race to define tokenized finance

The IMF report emphasized the growing role of regulators in shaping tokenized finance. Adrian said policymakers have a narrow window to determine how tokenized markets evolve, arguing that decisions on settlement assets, governance, interoperability and the role of central banks will help determine whether tokenization makes the financial system more efficient or introduces new systemic risks.

In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission has taken steps to clarify how existing securities laws apply to tokenized assets rather than creating a separate regulatory framework. 

Source: Cointelegraph

The agency has also signaled it is considering an “innovation exemption” that could allow market participants to test blockchain-based trading platforms for tokenized securities while a longer-term regulatory framework is developed.

Magazine: Can Robinhood or Kraken’s tokenized stocks ever be truly decentralized?