FINx Your Questions Answered: Stablecoins

I think we’ll continue to see experimentation, but not large-scale adoption any time soon. Governments are clearly interested, you’ve seen pilot issuances from organisations such as the World Bank and tokenised bond pilots in places like Hong Kong, but those are still very small relative to the size of sovereign bond markets, which run into trillions of dollars annually. The reality is that sovereign debt sits at the very centre of the financial system. It’s deeply embedded in primary dealer networks, central securities depositories, repo markets and monetary policy. Tokenisation today doesn’t yet offer a compelling enough advantage to justify re-engineering that infrastructure at scale. So my view is that forward-leaning jurisdictions will keep running pilots, often for policy or signalling reasons, but broad adoption will be slow and highly selective.

Not in any meaningful way, at least not in the short to medium term. Public markets are incredibly good at what they do (price discovery, liquidity, standardised disclosure). Global equity and bond markets raise many trillions of dollars a year and IP tokens don’t realistically compete with that. Where IP tokens make sense is as a structuring tool in private markets, for example, packaging royalty streams or revenue participation in a more efficient way. But that’s very different from disrupting public exchanges.

So while IP tokenisation is an interesting use case conceptually, I don’t see it changing how mainstream capital formation works.

Honestly, I don’t think this is primarily a regulatory problem, it’s a clarity and narrative problem. Jersey already has the foundations: a principles-based regulator, deep experience in funds and capital markets and early digital-asset guidance. What’s missing is a clear, simple story that market participants can understand quickly.

Firms want to know: if I’m tokenising a fund, a note or a settlement instrument, what does that look like in Jersey, how long does it take and who do I deal with?

The real test of success isn’t how elegant the framework looks on paper; it’s whether real blockchain and payments businesses actually choose to locate there. If that’s not happening yet, either the message isn’t landing or the pathway isn’t clear enough.

I don’t think so. I think Dubai is doing what it has always done in financial services. They’re very explicit about the risks they’re willing to take early infrastructure risk, regulatory clarity but they’re pairing that with clear licensing, supervision and enforcement. That’s not reckless; it’s strategic. We’ve seen the same approach in commodities, trade finance and Islamic finance. Digital assets and payments are just the next chapter.

Upskilling only really happens when there’s a commercial reason to do it. You can run as many training sessions as you like but people truly learn when they’re dealing with real clients, real assets and real regulatory scrutiny. That’s what we’ve seen everywhere digital-asset capability has matured. The good news is that baseline education is already widely available. What Jersey needs isn’t more theory, it’s deal flow and digital assets business moving to the Island.

Two things, mainly. First, there’s no overwhelming sense of urgency yet. Traditional payment rails still work well enough for most institutions, and until stablecoins clearly outperform them at scale, they stay a lower priority. Second, there’s still a knowledge gap at senior levels around reserves, issuer risk, accounting treatment and operational controls. That makes boards cautious even when the technology itself is proven.

Yes, and the numbers are already quite striking. Depending on how you measure it, stablecoins processed around US$30–35 trillion in transaction value last year. More conservative “adjusted” estimates which strip out internal exchange flows still come in around US$10–11 trillion. That tells you two things: first, this isn’t a niche technology anymore; second, we’re still early in institutional adoption. As tokenised cash and money market instruments develop, those volumes will only increase.

Not really, and I don’t find that surprising. Fractional ownership has existed for decades through funds and syndicates. Putting it on-chain doesn’t magically solve the hard problems, valuation, liquidity, governance. In my view, these use cases are often a distraction from where tokenisation really adds value, which is in payments, settlement, and market infrastructure.

Without getting into proposing entirely new regulation, the key things are clarity around legal characterisation, custody and settlement finality. Institutions need to know exactly what they’re holding, how it’s safeguarded and how it behaves in stress or insolvency scenarios. Once those questions are answered clearly, the rest tends to follow.

No, I don’t think replacement is the right way to think about it. Stablecoins are already acting as a functional overlay in certain contexts, cross-border payments, crypto markets, dollarised economies but Fiat currencies are embedded in tax systems, monetary policy and banking balance sheets. So, stablecoins will co-exist with Fiat, not replace it.