Circle, Ripple and Coinbase join UK tokenization task force with BlackRock

The UK government has named a 54-firm industry task force to move tokenization into the country’s wholesale financial markets, seating crypto companies Circle, Ripple and Coinbase alongside BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley. 

The task force was announced with the first report from Chris Woolard, HM Treasury’s Wholesale Digital Markets Champion, published July 13 and addressed to the Chancellor.

Woolard spent eight years at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), including a spell as interim chief executive officer in 2020, before taking the tokenization role in April 2026. The City of London Corporation is acting as secretariat, working with TheCityUK, UK Finance, the Investment Association and Innovate Finance.

What will the task force actually do?

According to the City of London Corporation, the firms that make up the task force will build live, end-to-end use cases, starting with tokenized repo over the next 12 months. 

Standards across the priority areas in the market value chain will be set by nine action groups.

The Global City, the Corporation’s investor-facing arm, stated that the repo use case is meant to see a live trial by spring 2027, with commodities and other asset classes considered later in the year.

The report also builds on DIGIT, the UK’s Digital Gilt instrument, a tokenized government bond. The first quarter of 2027 is reportedly being projected to see the first DIGIT, sitting inside the Bank of England and FCA’s Digital Securities Sandbox.

Which crypto companies made it to the 54-firm stakeholder list?

The full firm list runs well beyond the four Wall Street institutions. Crypto and adjacent companies that made it to the list are Circle, Ripple, Coinbase, Kraken’s Payward entity, Chainalysis, Fireblocks, Ctrl Alt, Digital Asset Holdings, which is behind the Canton Network, GFO-X, Ubyx, SLIX, Tokenovate, and Wintermute. 

The firms are in the same group with HSBC, Barclays, UBS, Citi, State Street, the London Stock Exchange Group, and DTCC, among others.

The task force brings stablecoin issuers and crypto exchanges in the same working group as the banks whose infrastructure they have often competed with.

Kirit Bhatia, chief digital assets officer at Banking Circle, stated that the harder problem is plumbing, not issuance. Tokenized markets “will need payment infrastructure that can support real-time settlement, cross-border movement, multiple forms of regulated money and interoperability between stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and existing fiat rails,” Bhatia said. 

Without it, he added, digital assets “risk becoming faster at the edges but still constrained by the legacy plumbing underneath.”

The numbers behind the push

The economic case leans on a large forecast. Woolard’s report cites a Boston Consulting Group estimate that the tokenized real-world asset market could reach $88 trillion by 2035, against a current crypto and stablecoin market of around $3 trillion. 

For the UK specifically, the report projects up to £33 billion in additional annual economic output and £14 billion in yearly tax revenue by 2035.

For Woolard, the stakes are more competitive rather than certain. He called tokenized markets “a network game” and warned the UK’s position “is not guaranteed,” writing that the country “needs to move at the speed of the most agile players.” 

Chancellor Rachel Reeves said keeping the UK’s lead in global finance means “harnessing technologies like tokenisation,” and City of London Corporation Policy Chairman Chris Hayward described the moment as a chance to “lead a digital Big Bang in financial services.”

The report is open for feedback until September 4, 2026, and membership for the nine action groups is due to be finalized by the end of that month. Woolard’s second report to the Chancellor is expected in July 2027.