Fireblocks has spent the last several years working with more than 100 banks to help them build their digital assets capabilities. This report is independent confirmation of what that work has already shown us: the next step is getting into production.
The strength of this report is the insights it provides: SODA had targeted discussions with the global markets divisions of sixteen of the world’s largest sell-side institutions. These are the banks whose commitment of capital will define how tokenized markets scale. The report examines four use cases in depth: collateral mobility and repo, debt capital markets, equity capital markets, and FX and cross-border payments. Collateral mobility and repo stands out as the furthest advanced, with the clearest economic logic of the four; equities is the least advanced, still finding its footing.
Three findings deserve particular attention.
First, ownership needs to shift. Business-line funding for collateral mobility now runs ahead of innovation-budget funding in half the sample, but platform selection stays specialist-led, chosen for technical fit rather than the criteria business heads will actually be held to. Getting business heads into that decision now is critical for moving from pilot to production.
Second, banks can see where the value should be, but they are still working out how to prove and monetize it. Funding costs, liquidity usage, collateral velocity, and counterparty risk all surface as candidate benefits, and each bank maps the technology onto its own balance sheet, inventory and client franchise differently. No single business case has emerged across the sample. That variety is a strength: it rewards infrastructure that adapts to each institution rather than imposing a single direction, but until those business cases are made, tokenization stays a pilot conversation, not a production one.
Third, demand is running ahead of plumbing. Inertia ranks last among the barriers respondents cite; what remains is documentation, integration, and infrastructure catching up with appetite. The banks that solve that now, while demand is still building, will be the ones positioned to scale first.
The work now underway, building the front-to-back operating model that runs tokenization at production scale, is the work Fireblocks does every day alongside these institutions. Banks recognize that decades of core business can be reshaped by digital assets: nine in ten expect tokenization of repo and collateral to moderately or fundamentally reshape liquidity management within five years, even as no bank surveyed calls its own infrastructure fully ready to run it today. That is the gap this report measures, and the gap our work closes. Download the full report here.
