Mathias Imbach

Institutional players are increasingly adopting digital assets, including private sector stablecoins, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), tokenized real-world assets, and tokenized deposits, as part of their financial infrastructure. With 2025 poised to be the breakout year for digital money, this session brings together financial institutions, regulators, and leaders in the digital assets space to discuss:

·      The emerging use-cases and commercial opportunities for on-chain assets, such as improved cross-border transactions and programmable money applications
·      The risks institutions will have to navigate when managing their digital money assets, including financial volatility, cyber risks, and compliance concerns
·      Integrated approaches to managing assets across the traditional finance and decentralised finance landscape

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is frequently highlighted as a game-changer for financial market infrastructure (FMI). Yet, despite numerous pilots, proofs of concept, and even some production deployments, it has (yet) neither replaced nor fundamentally transformed today’s financial markets. Rather, DLT has remained limited to niche applications.

Which key elements are still missing, or are insufficiently mature, to enable DLT to truly reshape FMI? Is the main hurdle the current regulatory framework, or do challenges around standardization, interoperability with legacy systems, scalability, governance, and proven use cases with sufficient value bear the greatest responsibility?