Tokenized money market funds and digital bank deposits are moving from experimental pilot to early-stage financial infrastructure, executives from Franklin Templeton, SWIFT and Ledger said at the Hong Kong 2026 Consensus on Wednesday.
“Take existing traditional financial instruments, make them cheaper, better, faster, by bringing them on-chain natively,” said Chetan Karkhanis of Franklin Templeton.
The asset manager has focused on tokenizing money market funds, a roughly $10 trillion global asset class made up of short-term Treasury bills and repos. By issuing fund shares natively on-chain and making them accessible through self-custody wallets or exchanges, Franklin Templeton aims to provide 24/7 liquidity and reduce operational costs such as shareholder service fees, which can range from five to 15 basis points.
On the banking side, SWIFT is exploring how tokenized deposits – digital representations of bank debts – could modernize payments without disrupting balance sheets.
“Banks have fiat balances on their balance sheet… but as they move towards the new form of digital value, token deposits represent them on-chain,” said Devendra Verma of SWIFT’s digital assets unit.
SWIFT, which connects more than 11,500 institutions worldwide, is building a blockchain-based orchestration layer designed to interoperate with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), tokenized deposits, and other regulated digital assets. With 75% of SWIFT payments already reaching recipients within 10 minutes, Verma said the ambition is to eliminate cut-off times and holiday delays in favor of “24/7, anytime availability.”
Yet adoption remains modest compared to global financial markets. Karkhanis noted that about $300 billion in stablecoins and about $40 billion in tokenized treasures and other real-world assets are now on-chain – “a drop in the ocean” compared to more than $200 trillion in global wealth.
Regulation is a major constraint. “Regulatory clarity is very, very important,” Verma said, emphasizing the need for consistent standards in accounting, compliance and balance sheet treatment before institutions expand more aggressively.
Another sticking point is security and governance. “How can we do it securely? With confidence, with confidence, that’s the key question,” said Ledger’s Jean-François Rochet, arguing that managing private keys and institutional controls remains a cultural and technical hurdle.
Despite the origins of cryptocurrency disintermediation, panelists said the future is likely to be hybrid. “You can have it both ways,” Karkhanis said, suggesting that decentralized access and traditional intermediaries will coexist. Some intermediaries could disappear, Rochet added, but those who remain will have to justify their role in a redesigned financial package.
