Almost 700,000 wallets now hold tokenized traditional assets, up 25% since the start of the year. The investor base is forming. The question is who gets to serve it.
Yesterday, Franklin Templeton made its bid. Together with Ondo, the $1.7 trillion asset manager will tokenize a selection of its traditional ETFs and offer them to eligible investors globally.
It’s the classic SPV structure: Ondo purchases shares of the Franklin ETFs and issues tokens through an SPV that passes the financial exposure through to holders. Investors own rights to the return stream, not the underlying shares, and can trade these assets 24/7.
"You can think of this as a new distribution channel," commented Sandy Kaul, Head of Innovation at Franklin Templeton. "These ETFs represent a good mix of different exposures. And it gives a good test case for us to see what is really striking the appetite of this new audience."
For Franklin Templeton, this marks a notable expansion of its strategy.
Until now, the asset manager has distributed its own product, FOBXX, a tokenized money market fund, mainly through its proprietary Benji Platform. The result so far? Just over 1,000 holders.
With Ondo, they will plug into an existing network of wallets and decentralized exchanges, while keeping the other foot on their own rails.
In today’s newsletter:
Exclusive: Crédit Agricole prepares to launch a euro-denominated stablecoin
NYSE taps Securitize to build tokenized securities platform
HIGH SIGNAL NEWS
Nasdaq and Talos partner on tokenized collateral management. The firms are integrating Talos' digital asset infrastructure with Nasdaq's Calypso and Trade Surveillance platforms to give institutions a unified environment for managing on- and off-chain collateral workflows, cross-asset risk, and compliance. 🤝
NYSE taps Securitize to build tokenized securities platform. Under a memorandum of understanding, Securitize will act as the design partner for NYSE’s planned Digital Trading Platform, a blockchain-based venue for trading tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs. The firm is also expected to be among the first authorized issuers of tokenized equities on the platform, pending regulatory approval. 🇺🇸
DZ BANK and KfW complete first end-to-end digital bond issuance on public blockchain. The two banks used a smart bond contract on Polygon to manage the full lifecycle of a crypto security under Germany’s Electronic Securities Act, from funding need through issuance to settlement. The pilot reduced the typical five-day process to around one hour and removed the need for a central securities depository. 🇩🇪
Canada's fourth-largest bank introduces tokenized cash platform. Built on CME Group's permissioned network on Google Cloud Universal Ledger, the platform will let BMO's institutional clients convert U.S. dollars into tokenized cash for 24/7 margining, collateral and settlement. The launch is targeted for the second half of 2026, pending regulatory approval. 🇨🇦
Murex partners with Quant to bring tokenised assets into core capital markets infrastructure. The firms are integrating Quant’s programmable money platform with Murex’s cross-asset system, enabling banks to issue, settle, and manage tokenised deposits and digital bonds directly within existing trading, risk, and post-trade workflows. 🏦
TOP STORY
Exclusive: Crédit Agricole Prepares to Launch a Euro-Denominated Stablecoin
Summer launch: Crédit Agricole, Europe's second-largest banking group with €2.4 trillion in assets, is preparing to launch a euro-denominated stablecoin. The project is still in the structuring phase, but people familiar with the matter told Blockstories that a launch is expected for this summer. When contacted, Crédit Agricole declined to comment.
Why it matters: Crédit Agricole would become the fourth European bank to enter stablecoin issuance, following Société Générale (via SG-FORGE), Banking Circle, and ODDO BHF. Twelve more, including BNP Paribas, BBVA, and UniCredit, have joined Qivalis, a consortium aiming to issue its own euro stablecoin in the second half of this year.
Scale: With more than 2,300 local entities, around 40 regional banks, and a dozen specialized subsidiaries including Amundi, Crédit Agricole operates one of the most complex treasury structures in European banking. According to people familiar with the matter, that complexity is what is driving the group's ambition to develop tokenized cash solutions.
Here's what our sources tell us about the initiative:
Treasury first: In its initial phase, the stablecoin will target intra-group liquidity, enabling faster cash circulation across the group's subsidiaries, regional banks, and clients. Retail expansion and DeFi integrations may follow, but only after the internal use case proves out.
Credit institution issuance: The issuing entity has not yet been formally confirmed, but sources point toward a group entity holding a credit institution license. Under MiCA, this could allow the stablecoin to be backed through the bank’s balance sheet, rather than requiring fully segregated 1:1 reserves. ODDO BHF became the first European bank to adopt this balance-sheet approach when it launched EUROD last October.
Third-party reserves: Crédit Agricole is also considering placing part of the reserves with third-party banks. People familiar with the matter describe this as a way to mitigate credit risk and strengthen credibility by distributing reserves across external banking institutions.
How the four European banks and stablecoin issuers compare
From wait-and-see to acceleration: As recently as last year, Crédit Agricole had no formal stablecoin strategy. That changed in October, when the group internally decided to enter the tokenized cash race, internal sources told Blockstories. A first public signal followed in February, when Crédit Agricole joined the FARO consortium alongside Citi, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, and BNP Paribas, which aims to develop reserve-backed digital money for public blockchains.
Parallel tracks: As we revealed a few weeks ago, Crédit Agricole is also part of ongoing discussions with other major French banks to prepare a tokenized deposit system. That project remains at an early stage, with no pilot or launch date set.
“Tokenized deposits may be the preferred long-term solution for banks, but nobody in Europe has managed to onboard enough banks to make them work at scale," a senior banker told Blockstories. "Stablecoins are ready now, and banks can already build use cases around them. That's why most are starting there.”
Industry perspectives: To better understand how other banks are prioritizing their first stablecoin use cases and what treasury operations stand to gain from stablecoin-based cross-border payments, we spoke with two practitioners on the front lines.
Vid Hribar is Head of Institutional Partnership at Qivalis, the European banking consortium aiming to launch a euro-denominated stablecoin in the second half of 2026. The initiative brings together 12 banks, including BNP Paribas, ING, DekaBank, and UniCredit.
Looking at the banks in the Qivalis consortium: what are they prioritizing as their first stablecoin use cases, and where does treasury management fit in?
There is no single entry point. What we observe is that banks prioritize feasibility, starting with what they can implement today rather than where they ultimately aim to go strategically.
Some banks are starting simply with stablecoin on- and off-ramping, because their clients already hold stablecoins and need a way to convert them back to fiat. Others that already offer crypto trading are looking at euro stablecoin pairs to bring onchain liquidity to their existing platforms.
For banks with significant cross-border payment volumes, the stablecoin sandwich model is drawing significant interest: fintechs have proven it works, and banks see that they can reduce costs while preserving their margins. The challenge is that cross-border use cases require both a global distribution network and local liquidity in each corridor, and regulatory treatment of stablecoins still varies significantly across jurisdictions.
We see that many banks are still refining their analysis of which use case to prioritize. There is strong enthusiasm, and regular conversations within our consortium are accelerating that thinking, but pinpointing “we will do this first” is still a work in progress for a number of institutions.
Anjli Amin is Head of Europe at OpenFX, a cross-border payment infrastructure provider, enabling institutions and enterprises to move money globally via stablecoins.
What does it actually mean to use stablecoins for internal treasury operations, and what is there to gain?
Cross-border fund flows between a bank's own entities still often route through multiple correspondent banks, particularly outside core currency corridors. Each hop means batch processing, cutoff times, and delays that can stretch to days over weekends and holidays. Even where real-time alternatives like SEPA Instant exist for specific routes, the overall picture for a banking group operating across dozens of markets remains fragmented.
A stablecoin creates a parallel, 24/7 lane for certain intra-group flows: instead of routing liquidity through multiple intermediaries on different schedules, a banking group can move value directly between subsidiaries on continuous rails. That does not replace correspondent infrastructure wholesale, but it gives treasury teams a faster channel for the flows where speed and capital efficiency matter most.
The capital efficiency piece is what makes this compelling beyond operational convenience. In our own research, we estimated that roughly $10 trillion in capital is currently trapped in pre-funded correspondent accounts globally, much of it earning minimal returns. Every day those funds are locked in transit, the institutions that own the capital cannot generate returns. Compress settlement from days to near-instant for even a portion of intra-group flows and you free working capital that can be redeployed. At the scale of a top-tier global banking group, those marginal gains add up quickly.
BNY: Senior Vice President, Transfer Agency for Digital Assets Product Management, Luxembourg 🇱🇺
Danske Bank: Technical Lead — Digital Assets, Copenhagen, 🇩🇰
dwp Bank: Networkmanager Digital Assets & Crypto Custody, Frankfurt 🇩🇪
Kinexys: Digital Assets — Product Manager — Vice President, London 🇬🇧
Santander: Global Head of Digital Assets — Global Transaction Banking, Madrid 🇪🇸
State Street: Digital Assets Product Management Lead, VP, Luxembourg 🇱🇺
Beyond Dollarization: The Rise of Local Currency Stablecoins (Visa x Dune) — A data-driven analysis of non-USD stablecoins and their growing adoption as alternatives to dollar-based settlement.
Stablecoins and the Future of Payments: Evidence from Financial Markets (IMF) — A working paper using stock price data to assess the disruptive impact of stablecoins on incumbent payment firms.
Global Stablecoin Rules in Focus: A Cross-Border Guide to the New Era of Stablecoin Regulation (Gibson Dunn) — A legal reference mapping the divergent stablecoin frameworks taking shape across the U.S., EU, UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, and UAE.
Crypto OTC Trading Report 2026 (Finery Markets x Stablecoin Insider) — An analysis of the evolving institutional crypto market structure, highlighting how stablecoin settlement and OTC trading are increasingly replacing traditional banking rails.
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Disclaimer: The information provided in the Institutional Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.