Britain's £33B Tokenization Bet: From Pilot Light to Live Markets by 2027 🏛️

A UK government-backed industry task force estimates that tokenizing financial markets could add as much as 33 billion pounds ($44 billion) to the country's annual economic output by 2035, according to the first report from Wholesale Digital Markets Champion Chris Woolard. Appointed by HM Treasury, Woolard developed the report with the task force to guide implementation of the government's digital markets strategy. The document sets out a 12-month plan to test blockchain in a transaction where securities are used to borrow cash and calls for the UK to issue its first tokenized government bond by the first quarter of 2027.

The roadmap is designed to move UK tokenization beyond isolated pilots and into live markets where securities can be traded, settled and used as collateral. The report said the task was now to shift "from pilots to scale" and "from ambition to action." Ripple, listed among the task force's industry members, backed the initiative on Monday, stating that "onchain funds, bonds and repo aren't experiments" and that such instruments are already proving "cheaper, better and faster than their legacy equivalents."

The digital government bond, or gilt, builds on earlier steps. The UK first announced the Digital Gilt Instrument pilot in November 2024, followed by a July 2025 update outlining plans for onchain settlement, over-the-counter trading and secondary-market development. On Feb. 12, the government appointed HSBC's Orion platform to support the pilot. The new report expands the intended role of the instrument, calling for subsequent digital-gilt offerings, live secondary-market trading and eligibility for use as central bank collateral. The report noted that tokenized securities have limited value unless they can be traded or used to raise cash, and urged the Bank of England to accept digital gilts as collateral.

Supporting infrastructure is already taking shape. On Sept. 23, 2025, London-based Fnality launched a sterling-denominated payment system tied to central bank reserves, designed to support real-time repo