By Paul Frost-Smith
Co-CEO, Komainu
The article below was originally posted in The CfC St. Moritz Report on 18/12/2025.
Today’s post-trade environment is defined by friction. Fragmented infrastructure and jurisdictional silos mean assets rarely move at the speed modern markets demand. For institutions, this friction has a price tag: managing liquidity and regulatory capital requirements has become a costly but necessary balancing act.
As these pressures mount, the ability to mobilise collateral efficiently is becoming a systemic priority. Crucially, this need coincides with a technological shift: the tokenisation of real-world assets. By representing traditional instruments on blockchain networks, we are moving closer towards a 24/7 market where assets can be tokenised, transferred, and settled near-instantly.
The momentum behind tokenisation is set to shift gears in 2026. As institutions seek to reduce counterparty risk and streamline operations, programmable digital assets offer the only viable path toward a frictionless collateral ecosystem. We are moving toward a future where financial markets redefine the very nature of ownership, settlement, and value transfer.
Infrastructure Is Maturing for Institutional Scale
Blockchains have long been recognised for their transparency, security, and auditability. Yet early iterations lacked the interoperability and scalability required for regulated financial use cases. Over the past year, however, significant progress has been made. Purpose-built networks such as Stellar and Ripple’s XRPL have gained traction for their ability to support faster settlement and cross-border functionality. These developments demonstrate that blockchain rails are becoming more capable of serving as core financial infrastructure rather than experimental parallel systems.
Among the emerging technologies, one that has the potential to be transformational is Bitcoin’s Liquid Network. Liquid, a federated sidechain pegged to Bitcoin, is designed specifically to deliver fast, confidential, and final settlement. By anchoring a tokenisation ecosystem to Bitcoin’s security model while enabling near-instant transfers, Liquid aims to resolve the long-standing trade-off between decentralisation and institutional practicality. For markets that prize both resilience and speed, such as collateral management, this combination is noteworthy.
Networks like Liquid will become essential to the next generation of regulated market architecture. Their programmability allows assets to be automatically pledged, rehypothecated within permitted limits, or released based on predefined conditions. Such capabilities bring the vision of real-time collateral mobility closer to reality.
The Custody Evolution
However, as assets begin to move at the speed of software, the role of the custodian becomes more, not less, critical. In TradFi, custody was often synonymous with storage – a static vault for static assets. In a tokenised world, custody must evolve into a dynamic gateway.
Achieving true mobility requires a custody infrastructure that can support active assets without compromising security. This necessitates an evolution from passive cold storage to programmatic custody solutions. Institutions require qualified custodians who can not only hold keys securely, leveraging technologies like Multi-Party Computation (MPC) alongside traditional Hardware Security Modules (HSM), but can also interact seamlessly with smart contracts and exchanges.
The custodian effectively serves as the definitive link between digital execution and legal ownership. They verify that the asset exists, that it is unencumbered, and that the instruction to move it is valid, all while keeping the asset bankruptcy-remote and segregated. For institutional providers, the challenge is to offer the transactional speed required by tokenised markets without compromising the banking-grade security that regulators demand. The ability to manage keys across different blockchains while providing a unified, real-time view of collateral is the new competitive frontier.
The Road to Fully Mobile Collateral
Achieving true collateral mobility requires more than faster settlement. It involves rethinking how assets are defined, how ownership is recorded, and how risk is managed. Tokenisation enables collateral to exist in a form that is both digitally native and universally recognisable across platforms. When combined with smart contracts, tokenised collateral can move automatically between venues, respond to margin requirements instantly, and reduce operational overhead.
However, interoperability remains a key industry challenge. While individual networks may provide robust capabilities, the financial system is too interconnected to rely on isolated ecosystems. Solutions such as cross-chain communication protocols, standardised digital asset formats, and regulated bridges will be essential to achieving mobility at scale. Encouragingly, these areas are now receiving concentrated industry attention, signalling that the path to integration is becoming clearer.
A Turning Point Ahead
Looking toward 2026, the convergence of tokenisation and collateral mobility will dictate how liquidity is generated and managed. As institutions deepen their engagement with blockchain-based infrastructure, the operational efficiencies of programmable assets will become impossible to ignore.
The real turning point will arrive when interoperability, regulation, and secure custody align to allow collateral to move seamlessly across jurisdictions. At that moment, tokenisation shifts from innovation to systemic utility, marking the beginning of a market structure built on digital ownership and secure, real-time settlement.