Only 10 of the 290 largest transaction banks — 3.4% — can move a tokenized deposit or a stablecoin today. Even counting every bank committed to launching by June 2027, that group grows to just 21%. BRN's new report tests why the gap between cleared volume and installed capability holds across every onchain use now on offer to a treasury desk, and finds the same answer every time: where the cash leg settles.
Payments already work. Funds still don't.
Business-to-business stablecoin payments reached roughly $226 billion annualised in 2025, growing more than sevenfold in a year (Artemis), moving under reserve and redemption rules now in force under the GENIUS Act and MiCA. Tokenized money-market funds hold the same dollars in a more conservative portfolio, but settle on a business day inside a seven-hour window. Neither asset quality nor issuer sophistication explains the gap — the report maps what does.
The perimeter decides the outcome
BlackRock's BUIDL holds $2.56 billion, yet trades among just 106 holders with $332 million moving across 182 transfers a month — a profile that looks like custodial movement, not an active market. The reason is structural: transfers are restricted to a whitelist written into the token contract, so an instrument can settle onchain and still circulate only among approved holders. The report traces how that same allowlist logic explains the thin secondary markets forming around every tokenized fund on the market today.
Collateral only moves inside a perimeter that already exists
Tokenized collateral is reachable today only through counterparties that already clear the trade: Broadridge clears $7.5 trillion a month in repo against tokenized securities, and Eurex Clearing became the first CCP to move collateral over a distributed ledger. Outside that perimeter — in a Brazilian rural credit pilot the report examines in detail — a token can track an asset in real time while the legal claim over it still waits at a registry office.
The full report also sets out the eight readiness questions a board should ask before approving any onchain instrument — reordered by where the cash settles and who owes the answer — plus a dated scorecard of which settlement-layer initiatives (J.P. Morgan's Kinexys, the 17-bank tokenized deposit network, SWIFT's shared ledger, and more) are actually in production versus still a pilot or an announcement.
Download the full report at the link below
BRN is institutional-grade research on digital asset markets. Access is available to asset managers, allocators, family offices, and buy-side professionals.
