Coinbase UK chief Keith Grose is seeing tokenised collateral move from controlled pilots into practical day-to-day market usage, and he links that shift to rising institutional engagement and clearer regulatory guardrails. He pointed to a data point that 62% of institutions have maintained or increased crypto exposure since October, framing it as evidence that operational demand is now catching up with the narrative.
That demand is material because it sits directly in the settlement layer: tokenised money-market funds, digital bonds, and regulated stablecoins can function as immediately usable collateral. When collateral becomes programmable and instantly transferable, repo and derivatives workflows can compress intraday liquidity risk and tighten delivery-versus-payment execution.
Regulation is turning tokenised collateral into “allowed plumbing”
Grose’s view is that mainstreaming is being pulled forward by a convergence of regulatory and market action rather than a single breakthrough. He highlighted the CFTC’s pilot for tokenised collateral in derivatives markets as a concrete pathway to deploy digital collateral inside regulated venues.
He also tied momentum to stablecoin legal clarity that supports tokenised settlement and margin flows. In the same frame, the U.S. Senate’s passage of the GENIUS Act on June 17, 2025 is positioned as a step that reduces legal friction around regulated stablecoins, which are foundational for many tokenised cash-and-collateral patterns.
On the market side, tokenisation is already being used in production-style structures that institutions recognize. Since early 2024, tokenised money-market funds have expanded quickly, with examples such as BlackRock’s BUIDL fund illustrating how short-term government-backed paper can be represented and moved in token form.
The collateral story extends beyond cash-like products into credit and multi-venue usage. Examples discussed include Apollo working with Securitize to tokenize private credit funds, and using those tokens as collateral through DeFi lending rails like Morpho, creating an operational bridge between traditional asset managers and on-chain counterparties.
Infrastructure pilots are validating delivery-versus-payment at scale
Grose’s core thesis is that tokenised collateral is no longer an experiment looking for a business case; it is a workflow upgrade looking for throughput. As he put it, “Tokenised collateral is transitioning from experimental phases to becoming a core component of financial market infrastructure.”
Under the hood, public-sector infrastructure tests are reinforcing that direction by validating the rails needed for resilient settlement. Pilot efforts by the Swiss National Bank and the European Central Bank issuing digital bonds with wholesale CBDC settlement demonstrate on-chain delivery-versus-payment mechanics that can shorten settlement ladders and reduce counterparty exposure during the settlement window.
From an operating-model standpoint, tokenised collateral requires a full-stack view rather than a single product feature. The essential building blocks are tokenised money-market funds, digital bonds with on-chain DvP, regulated stablecoins, and custody-plus-derivatives infrastructure that can support institutional-grade controls.
Coinbase is positioning itself for that migration with an institutional “Coinbase Tokenize” product set and expansion into tokenised stocks and prediction markets. Scale expectations referenced alongside this strategy are ambitious, with tokenised asset markets projected around $400 billion by 2026 and approaching $2 trillion by 2030, implying materially larger collateral inventories and settlement traffic.
For treasuries, market makers, and exchange operators, the value proposition is straightforward but operationally demanding. Tokenisation can improve intraday liquidity management, reduce margin transfer latency, and enable atomic asset-for-cash swaps that shrink settlement risk, but it also forces upgrades in reconciliation, custody responsibility mapping, and high-availability signing infrastructure.
As stablecoin frameworks and CBDC-style settlement experiments mature, liquidity is likely to migrate to tokenised rails wherever it is cost-effective. That shift will reshape bandwidth allocation, latency tolerance, and consensus-layer dependencies for regulated settlement flows, with direct implications for resilience, congestion patterns, and 24/7 collateral availability.