Britain's Going Onchain: 54 Firms Queue Up to Turn the Pound Into Pixels 🎩

BlackRock and HSBC have joined a UK tokenization task force projected to add up to $44 billion to annual economic output, as 54 firms signed on to a plan led by former interim Financial Conduct Authority head Christopher Woolard. Woolard, the British government's wholesale digital markets champion, delivered his first report to the Treasury in July 2026 outlining a path from pilot programs to live markets, declaring: "Onchain funds, bonds and repo aren't experiments. They're already happening, delivering onchain financial instruments that are cheaper, better and faster than their legacy equivalents."

The economic case comes from a joint study by Barclays and PwC estimating that tokenization could add up to $44 billion (£33 billion) to UK output by 2035, with roughly two-thirds of the gain falling outside financial services in the wider economy. The top figure represents an upper-bound scenario assuming the UK becomes a leading hub while the US and Europe adopt in parallel; a more cautious estimate points to about $29 billion (£22 billion) per year, plus $19 billion (£14 billion) in additional annual tax revenue. The tokenized real-world asset base stood near $30 billion in 2025, having grown about 300% over the year, while Boston Consulting Group projects tokenized assets could reach around $55 trillion by 2035.

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, runs BUIDL, the largest tokenized US Treasury fund, with about $2.4 billion in assets, and registered as a UK cryptoasset firm in 2025. HSBC has issued digital bonds through its Orion platform, and the task force also includes JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citi, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Fidelity International, Schroders, State Street, DTCC, Euroclear, the London Stock Exchange Group, Circle, Ripple, and Coinbase.