Tokenized money market funds and digital bank deposits are moving from pilots to early-stage financial infrastructure, executives from Franklin Templeton, SWIFT and Ledger said Wednesday at Consensus Hong Kong 2026.
“Take traditional existing financial instruments and make them cheaper, better and faster by bringing them natively on-chain,” said Franklin Templeton’s Chetan Karkhanis.
The asset manager is focused on tokenizing money market funds, an approximately $10 trillion global asset class made up of short-term Treasury bills and repurchase agreements. By issuing fund shares natively on-chain and accessed through a self-hosted wallet or exchange, Franklin Templeton aims to provide 24/7 liquidity and reduce operational costs, such as shareholder service fees, which can range from 5 to 15 basis points.
On the banking side, SWIFT is exploring how tokenized deposits (digital representations of bank liabilities) can modernize payments without disrupting balance sheets.
“Banks have fiat balances on their balance sheets… but as banks move to new digital forms of value, tokenized deposits represent these balances on-chain,” said Devendra Verma of SWIFT’s digital assets division.
SWIFT, which connects more than 11,500 institutions around the world, is building a blockchain-based orchestration layer designed to interoperate with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), tokenized deposits and other regulated digital assets. While 75% of SWIFT payments have reached beneficiaries within 10 minutes, Verma said the goal is to eliminate deadlines and holiday delays to support “24/7 availability.”
However, adoption remains low relative to global capital markets. Karkhanis noted that approximately $300 billion in stablecoins, approximately $40 billion in tokenized treasuries, and other real-world assets are now on-chain — “just a drop in the ocean” compared to more than $200 trillion in global wealth.
Regulation is a key constraint. “Regulatory clarity is very, very important,” Verma said, noting the need for consistent standards in accounting, compliance and balance sheet treatment before institutions can scale up more aggressively.
Security and governance are another friction point. “How do we do this securely? The key issue is trust and confidence,” said Ledger’s Jean-François Rochet. He believes that managing private keys and institutional controls remains a cultural and technical barrier.
Although cryptocurrencies have their origins in disintermediation, panelists said the future is likely to be hybrid. “You can have it both ways,” Kahanis said, suggesting that decentralized access and traditional intermediaries will coexist. Lochte added that some intermediaries may disappear, but those that remain will need to justify their role in a redesigned financial system.