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Monument Bank and Midnight Foundation Launch UK’s First Retail Deposit Tokenization Program

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Brian Armstrong's Bold Prediction: AI Agents Will Soon Dominate Global Financial

TLDR:

  • Monument Bank targets £250M in tokenized deposits on Midnight’s privacy-enhancing public blockchain network.
  • Deposits remain fully backed, redeemable in GBP, and protected under the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme.
  • Phase two opens retail access to private equity, commodity funds, and structured products via the Monument app.
  • Phase three introduces Lombard-style lending, letting customers borrow against investments without liquidating their assets.

Monument Bank is set to become the first UK-regulated bank to tokenize retail customer deposits on a public blockchain. The bank, regulated by the Bank of England, manages roughly £7 billion in deposits.

Working with the Midnight Foundation, Monument plans to bring up to £250 million in deposits onto the Midnight network.

The program targets mass-affluent customers seeking access to modern financial tools while retaining full regulatory protection under existing UK frameworks.

Tokenized Deposits Open New Doors for Retail Banking Customers

Monument’s approach centers on representing customer savings as digital tokens on Midnight’s privacy-enhancing blockchain.

Each token corresponds one-to-one with funds held at the bank, functioning as a digital mirror of a traditional deposit. Customers will earn interest just as they would with a standard savings account.

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The deposits remain fully backed by Monument and redeemable in pounds sterling. They also stay protected under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, preserving the same safeguards customers already rely on.

Blockchain infrastructure operates behind the scenes, requiring no direct handling of digital assets by the customer.

Midnight’s architecture ensures that transaction data stays shielded and accessible only to Monument Bank and its customers.

This privacy-focused design addresses one of the central challenges facing blockchain adoption in regulated finance. It allows the bank to operate on a permissionless network without exposing sensitive financial information.

Fahmi Syed, President of the Midnight Foundation, addressed this directly. “Financial institutions around the world are exploring how blockchain infrastructure can support regulated financial products, but one of the persistent challenges has been balancing transparency with the privacy requirements of modern banking,” he said.

Monument’s model demonstrates how a regulated bank can bring traditional products on-chain while staying within compliance and consumer protection frameworks.

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Monument’s Founder, Mintoo Bhandari, framed the move as a continuation of the bank’s core mission. “Monument was founded on the promise of bringing the most innovative and valuable financial offerings, safely and securely, to the often overlooked and underserved mass-affluent community in the UK and beyond,” he said.

With over 100,000 customers, the bank is embedding these capabilities directly into the consumer experience, setting this initiative apart from institutional-only tokenization efforts seen elsewhere.

Three-Phase Rollout Targets Investments and Lending Access

Beyond deposits, Monument has outlined a broader three-phase roadmap to expand what customers can do within its platform.

The second phase will introduce tokenized real-world asset products managed by global asset managers, accessible directly through the Monument app.

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Customers will gain exposure to private equity, commodity funds, and structured products without buying or managing digital assets themselves.

These asset classes have historically been available only to ultra-high-net-worth individuals and institutional investors.

Monument’s structure is designed to change that by delivering institutional-grade products through a retail banking interface. The blockchain infrastructure running underneath remains invisible to the end user.

The third phase will introduce Lombard-style lending, allowing customers to borrow against their investments without selling them. Monument CEO Ian Rand noted the broader ambition behind this rollout.

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By combining these innovative capabilities with our exceptional client-centric service model, and the protections provided by the regulated banking framework of the UK, we are excited to deliver services that help our clients manage, and build, their prosperity,” he said.

This model has long been a feature of private banking services, offering more cost-effective credit access than standard borrowing. Bringing it to mass-affluent customers marks a notable shift in how consumer lending could work.

Daniel Fozzati, Founding Partner of The Building Blocks, called it “a world first by leveraging the UK’s innovation ecosystem.”

Research from Boston Consulting Group estimates tokenized financial assets could reach between $4 trillion and $16 trillion by 2030, and Monument’s initiative positions it early in that market.

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LINK price consolidates above $9 while CCIP adoption cements Chainlink’s tokenization role

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Chainlink’s (LINK) price is changing hands around $9.42 today, with 1-hour gains of 0.13%, a 24-hour rise of 3.64% and a 7-day increase of 1.19%, putting its market capitalization at roughly $6.67 billion on a circulating supply of about 708.09 million tokens.

LINK price consolidates above $9 while CCIP adoption cements Chainlink’s tokenization role - 1
Chainlink price 3-month chart, source: TradingView

LINK price hovers near 3-month low

Over the last 24 hours, LINK’s spot trading volume has reached about $659,390,868 across tracked exchanges, giving the asset a volume-to-market-cap ratio close to 10%, a level consistent with heavy but orderly trading in a liquid large-cap altcoin. In earlier snapshots, the token traded near $14.28 with a market cap of $9.94 billion and daily volume of $687.78 million, showing how LINK has compressed in price from its late-2025 range while maintaining deep liquidity.

Historical data from market dashboards shows that LINK remains far below its all-time high near $52.70, leaving it down roughly 70–73% from peak even after the latest bounce, but with its full 696–708 million token circulating supply actively traded across major venues. That combination of long-term drawdown and persistent liquidity has made LINK a structural component of many portfolios that want oracle and interoperability exposure, rather than purely momentum-driven flows.

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Chainlink is a decentralized oracle and interoperability network that connects smart contracts to off-chain data, computation and other blockchains, positioning LINK as a core infrastructure token rather than a pure DeFi coin, AI asset or layer-1. Its nodes deliver price feeds, proof-of-reserve data, random number generation and, increasingly, cross-chain messaging via the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). In this model, LINK is used to pay for oracle services and secure the network, making demand for tokenized assets, DeFi and institutional connectivity directly relevant to the token’s long-term economics.

Recent technical and ecosystem updates have reinforced this role. Chainlink’s own communication describes CCIP as an “end-to-end interoperability standard” that allows tokenized funds to keep their share register on one chain while using CCIP to process subscriptions and redemptions across others, including private bank networks and public blockchains like Ethereum and Solana. A January 2026 deep dive outlines plans for CCIP v1.5 on mainnet, which will enable self-serve token integrations, customizable rate limits and support for EVM-compatible zk-rollups, expanding the protocol’s reach.

Adoption data around CCIP and related services helps explain why LINK continues to attract directional interest despite its long consolidation. Research cited in a March 2026 price outlook estimates that CCIP has been averaging around $90 million in weekly token transfers, hinting at steady cross-chain volume already moving through the protocol. Chainlink itself reports that its oracle infrastructure has enabled over $28 trillion in cumulative transaction value across DeFi, tokenized assets and other use cases, providing a track record that appeals to institutional users.

New partnerships add regional and sector depth. In early March 2026, the ADI Foundation announced that it would integrate Chainlink and use CCIP as the canonical bridge for ADIChain, a network focused on tokenization across the Middle East, Africa and Asia and reportedly backed by over $240 billion in assets through its institutional partners. Under that collaboration, Chainlink also becomes ADIChain’s official oracle provider for price feeds, reserve verification and NAV calculations for stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, making LINK central to the network’s RWA and stablecoin stack.

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More broadly, coverage of CCIP in banking and asset management circles highlights pilot projects in which major banks and asset managers use Chainlink to move tokenized fund shares and stablecoins across public and private chains, including experiments by ANZ and SBI Digital Markets to settle cross-border payments and manage subscriptions. In that environment, LINK’s current price level around $9–$10, coupled with hundreds of millions of dollars in daily volume and a multi-year consolidation structure around the $14 support region, positions it as a liquid, infrastructure-linked bet on the scaling of tokenization and cross-chain activity rather than a short-lived momentum trade.

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Company Partnering with Marshall Islands to Boose Digital Sovereign Bond

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Company Partnering with Marshall Islands to Boose Digital Sovereign Bond

Update (March 25 8:22PM UTC): This article has been updated to clarify the role of M1X Global in the first paragraph.

The technology provider building the infrastructure for the Republic of the Marshall Islands’ universal basic income (UBI) program which will use a US dollar-pegged sovereign financial instrument has attracted some significant crypto-tied backers.

In a Tuesday notice shared exclusively with Cointelegraph, M1X Global announced that it had launched following a $3 million angel investment round by current and former executives connected to crypto and financial services companies.

Backers for the M1X Global angel round included former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan and Cumberland Labs CEO Tama Churchouse.

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According to the company, the funding will support the development and adoption of the USDM1 digital sovereign bond which allows citizens of the Republic of the Marshall Islands to access the UBI program.