Understanding the tokenisation of assets in financial markets

Asset tokenisation can generally be described as the digital representation of physical assets on distributed ledgers (also referred to as digital twins) or the issuance of native tokens on the blockchain. Although initially associated with mostly non-compliant initial coin offerings over the period 2017-18, currently tokenisation represents one of the most prominent cases of distributed ledger technologies in financial markets. This Going Digital Toolkit note identifies the different approaches that policy makers have adopted around tokenised assets and the markets for such instruments, and provides examples of these approaches. These approaches are not mutually exclusive and policy makers may differ in the way they address asset tokenisation, participants of tokenised markets, and risks arising in these markets. This Toolkit note does not classify approaches into categories, but rather describes elements and characteristics of different jurisdictional approaches to asset tokenisation, some of which can co-exist.