People on conference stages have declared the definitive ‘year of tokenisation’ more times than anyone can count. Matthew Longhurst, Co-Founder of TreasurySpring, thinks the real breakthrough will be one treasurers barely notice – and, in his mind, it starts with a database upgrade.
Every Sibos has its rituals. The walk between conference stages is always much longer than the map suggests, and at some point someone announces that this, finally, is the year a breakthrough technology will arrive. In Miami this year, the technology being hailed from the floor was, once again, tokenisation.
Matthew Longhurst, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of cash investment platform TreasurySpring, is suitably wry about it. “People have been talking about tokenisation for maybe the last ten years, and there are conferences about it all the time,” he recalls. “Every time the message is, ‘This year’s the year that it all happens.’ And yet, it hasn’t happened!”
He even concedes that sceptics might fairly ask whether the demand was ever there. So why spend Sibos week talking about it? Because something has (at last) shifted over the past year or two – just not in the way the keynote speeches tend to promise.
The big beasts move in
What’s changed, in Longhurst’s view, is not so much the rhetoric but who is turning up to build tokenised solutions. The technology has matured, and the large infrastructure players have stopped watching from the sidelines. BlackRock has tokenised money market funds (MMFs) directly on Ethereum, while Euroclear, Clearstream and DTCC are exploring private ledger-based systems that can interact with public networks such as Canton.
The clearest signal, for Longhurst, is a planned service from DTC (the Depository Trust Company, DTCC’s depository subsidiary) to tokenise eligible US Treasury securities on Canton. There is room to debate whether the prime record will sit on Canton or on DTC’s own systems, he concedes, “but the fact is, it’s going to make treasury bills programmable money”.
Once players of that size commit, others take note. “It’s given lots of the other institutions cause to think, maybe we should be building here as well,” he observes. Asset issuers are following – Franklin Templeton alongside BlackRock, with stablecoin issuers such as Circle already in the market – and TreasurySpring counts itself among them. Having been approved to become a Super Validator on the Canton Network, the firm is now setting out on a route of its own – one we’ll return to later.
None of that means the job is done, however. “I wouldn’t say all the problems have been solved in terms of how easy it is to get access, but the direction of travel is certainly in that direction,” Longhurst believes.
Easy does it
Does that mean treasurers should now brace for tokenisation-based upheaval? Not according to Longhurst. TreasurySpring has spent a decade making cash investment simpler for corporates – particularly treasury teams without extensive in-house infrastructure – and he has no wish to undo that work. “One of the things with tokenisation is that we don’t want to make life harder for these treasurers,” he explains.
He recognises that, from the outside, tokenisation can look daunting, raising questions such as: “What happens if I lose my keys? Do I lose all my assets? Am I ready for doing this?” That is why TreasurySpring has taken a gradual approach – one he expects the wider market to follow. In his view, traditional and tokenised finance will run side by side “for at least the next five years, if not the next ten”.
What’s the point?
Even a gradual approach needs a clear purpose, though, and Longhurst’s first test for any treasurer is blunt: why use tokenised assets at all? “It’s pointless doing it just to add in the extra process and effort – and risk, quite honestly,” he warns, noting that managing the infrastructure brings a security burden of its own.
For most treasurers, there isn’t a compelling answer yet. For a handful of digital-native companies, though, the benefits are already clear. Such firms might hold longer-dated assets and repo them for a day or two over the weekend, when traditional markets are shut, to fund trading in assets that never sleep, such as Bitcoin.
That scenario won’t apply to the vast majority of corporates, but the principle applies far more widely. If liquidity is reliably on tap, the case for parking cash overnight or in weekly instruments weakens. “Maybe you could be earning more in monthly or three-month assets if you know that you can get access to that liquidity,” Longhurst suggests.
Collateral is the other big prize. Corporates running FX swaps and derivatives typically post cash. Longhurst sees a future in which they post tokenised assets instead, remaining invested while counterparties keep their credit cover. Tokenised collateral could also make markets more resilient. In market stress, including SVB’s collapse, holders may rush to cash. Where that reflects collateral needs, posting MMF units instead could reduce the pressure. “You could argue that it could make the collateral system a little bit safer,” he reasons.
Which record is real?
If the benefits are this tangible, why isn’t tokenisation part of mainstream treasury yet? Longhurst sees a combination of regulation, interoperability and treasurer comfort at play, but he puts legal certainty first – starting with which record counts.
Some tokenised fund models “mirror” an underlying register, which raises an awkward question: if a token moves but the golden record isn’t updated, who owns what? “Some of these halfway house solutions have created more problems,” he argues, because users get the functionality without knowing what would stand up in court.
Then there is settlement finality – whether a transfer is legally complete and protected if one party fails – which the industry is only now starting to discuss. Securities issued through central securities depositories (CSDs) such as Euroclear, CREST or DTC carry that protection: if they sit in your custody account, they are yours, and a bankruptcy court can’t simply decide otherwise. Fund units recorded on a corporate register fall under a different regime, so don’t necessarily benefit in the same way. “You’re making something incredibly mobile, but the legals underneath haven’t evolved,” he cautions.
The gap is starting to close from both directions. Some jurisdictions – Switzerland in particular – are beginning to give DLT securities equal weight with CSD securities. Meanwhile, when CSDs such as DTC and Euroclear tokenise instruments like Treasury bills themselves, settlement finality comes along for the ride. “You can add that utility, but you don’t lose what you had,” Longhurst points out.
For funds and private company shares, the rules have yet to catch up, and until they do his advice is restraint: “You don’t necessarily want those things moving around hundreds of times in a day.”
Familiar deals, faster rails
Restraint doesn’t mean standing still, though. For now, Longhurst contends, tokens are most useful for making familiar transactions simpler. Picture a large bank lending against a company’s fund holdings – not a DeFi or crypto-style trade, but a deal between two parties who know each other, with the token serving as the delivery mechanism instead of “signing documents and stock transfer forms and pledges”.
Moving value between group companies is another example, he says – low in risk, but high in practical value. Today, a group typically sells its investments, sends cash and reinvests, losing yield along the way. Transferring a fund token instead could move that value up the chain instantly.
A ledger for two
It’s no coincidence that the token in his last example is a Fixed-Term Fund (FTF) share, TreasurySpring’s own product. The same thinking shapes the firm’s first step on Canton. Rather than reinventing the product, TreasurySpring plans to start by recording ownership of newly issued FTF shares on-chain. The initiative builds on a Canton industry working group that TreasurySpring took part in, which in January 2026 completed the first cross-border intraday repo using tokenised UK gilts.
Canton appeals because it offers a “safe middle ground” between fully public blockchains, where every transaction is visible to the world, and closed systems: only the parties to a transaction see its details. That makes it a natural fit for the gradual start Longhurst favours.
Today, the FTF ownership register sits with the transfer agent. Unlike a Treasury bill in a custody account, the investor has no direct view of it – at best a share certificate, which Longhurst dismisses as “old-fashioned paper”. TreasurySpring plans to extend that register so the transfer agent and the holder see the same golden record – a ledger, at its simplest, with two participants, one seeing its liability and the other its asset. That shared record is exactly what the mirrored models lack. “Phase one is really just a back-end upgrade,” he says.
What follows is where it gets interesting. Once holders can plug in third-party wallets, such as those from Fireblocks, they could start initiating transactions themselves. An investment bank attracted by the investment-grade credit of FTFs might lend against them for two weeks via a smart contract – around the clock with tokenised cash, or during banking hours with fiat. Those transactions would take place inside a whitelisted universe governed by existing fund rules. “We don’t do anything that requires digital assets regulation,” Longhurst stresses. “We work within the existing infrastructure.”
A welcome change
So, what will all of this mean for a treasurer’s world by 2030? Longhurst’s answer is sanguine: “Things won’t look that different,” he predicts. “What will change is what the treasurer doesn’t see.” Blockchains and digital rails may well run behind the scenes, but the technology shouldn’t make the treasurer’s job any harder.
He pictures two pots: a portfolio of traditional assets doing exactly what it always has, and a smaller, programmable pot that can be lent, borrowed against, repo’d or moved intragroup – prompting fresh thinking about how much liquidity sits in each bucket. Treasurers who want to get ahead should start talking to boards and auditors about wallets and cybersecurity now, he advises, but there’s no need to panic and rush to build infrastructure when new solutions arrive every month.
“It will look different, but it won’t look too different,” he concludes. “It’ll just be better.”
Let’s hope he’s right!
