How Institutional Tokenization Moved Beyond Crypto

Sophia Lopez, our Founder and President, attended Davos 2026 and sat down with Todd Fox, President of the Visa Economic Empowerment Institute, for Visa's Policy Sandbox podcast. Their talk centered on who is driving tokenization now. Visa featured her remarks in the episode "The Evolution of Digital Money," alongside Fox's interview with Cuy Sheffield, Visa's Head of Crypto.

What is institutional tokenization?

Institutional tokenization is the issuance and settlement of tokenized money and assets, such as deposits, central bank reserves, bonds and funds, by regulated institutions on networks that meet their governance, privacy and compliance requirements. Central banks, exchanges, central securities depositories and commercial banks now lead this work, much of it on permissioned networks.

Who is leading institutional tokenization?

Sophia made three points:

• The conversation has moved off the Promenade. Seven or eight years ago, digital asset discussions at Davos happened out on the Promenade and were mostly about crypto. This was her seventh year attending.
• Market infrastructure now drives it. The people talking about tokenization today run financial market infrastructure: exchanges such as Nasdaq, DTCC with plans to tokenize parts of its business, the large central securities depositories, and the banks. "It's really become an institutional conversation," she told Fox.
• Wholesale networks are already running. Sophia pointed to networks we have delivered with central banks and some of the largest banks and asset managers.

Those networks show what institutional tokenization looks like in practice:

• Hong Kong, Project Ensemble. In the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's sandbox, we supported HSBC in demonstrating payment-versus-payment (PvP) settlement across Besu networks involving HSBC, the HKMA and Hang Seng Bank. HSBC also ran delivery-versus-payment (DvP) between its Orion bond platform and its internal tokenized deposit network.
• Singapore, Project Guardian. For the Monetary Authority of Singapore, we powered the Guardian Wholesale Network live industry testnet. Tokenized cash, FX, fixed income, and asset and wealth management transacted in a single network with privacy enabled, with more than six entities and 15 roles tested end to end.
• Brazil, Drex. As technology vendor for Banco Central do Brasil, we work with 16 sets of commercial banks, consortia and Febraban, the Brazilian banking consortium with over 100 member banks. The test environment covers CBDC issuance to regulated institutions, DvP settlement of tokenized assets and privacy-preserving data exchange.

What does institutional tokenization mean for your infrastructure?

Fox used Sophia's comments to frame the episode's main thread: the line between traditional finance and crypto is getting harder to draw. For a bank's digital asset team, three practical points follow from the networks above.

Expect to connect to more than one network. Central bank sandboxes, FMI tokenization services and interbank ledgers such as the Swift Ledger each come with their own specification, onboarding process and timeline. A bank active in this space is likely to join several.

Get the cash leg right. In every one of these networks, tokenized deposits, tokenized reserves or CBDC settle the cash side of a PvP or DvP transaction. A tokenized deposit capability that can plug into each network underpins most other use cases.

Plan for privacy and governance from the start. Guardian ran with privacy enabled, and Drex tested privacy-preserving data exchange among participants. Regulated institutions need control over who sees what, who approves what and where keys live, which is why institutional networks like these run as permissioned networks.

Listen to the full episode on the Visa Economic Empowerment Institute site, or watch Sophia's segment on YouTube.