ENODA at the Edinburgh Tokenisation Summit
ENODA’s Eva Jovanova presents at Scotland’s first tokenisation summit. Where technology innovators, banks, asset managers, regulators, lawyers and builders convened in one room.
On 27 May, Scotland hosted its first Tokenisation Summit; a full day built around one question: How do we move real-world assets on-chain in the UK? Convened by Blockchain Scotland, the event drew a notably senior crowd from financial services, asset management, law, academia and technology, including ENODA.
The programme ran across the full tokenisation stack. The opening session set the foundations. Dr. Maciej Zurawski of Blockchain Scotland outlined the impact of tokenisation; Ian Wallis of Peebles.co took stock of where tokenisation and decentralised finance stand now that the speculative phase has passed; and Dr Tong Wang of the University of Edinburgh Business School pressed the question that usually gets least attention, that wide-spread tokenisation will be driven by incentives, adoption and market design, not only technology. This perspective resonates with ENODA’s own experience.
Afterwards, Sebastian Ricketts of the FCA set out the regulator’s vision for digital assets, including the crypto authorisation gateway ahead. Jamie Gray of Burness Paull detailed the extent of changes to UK fund tokenisation under the new crypto assets regime; Laeeq Shabbir of EY spoke to trust, risk and control; and Dovile Silenskyte of WisdomTree gave an issuer’s perspective, before a panel chaired by Dia Banerji of Cherpa.ai.
The afternoon turned to institutions and settlement infrastructure, featuring another impressive roster of speakers. Kara Kennedy, who leads market development for JP Morgan’s Kinexys, and Theo Golden, tokenisation lead at Baillie Gifford, took part in fireside conversations; Matthew Dawson of the Ethereum Foundation made the case for institutional adoption of Ethereum and joined the closing panel. The caliber of these talks and the vast range of expertise across leading corporations- a global bank, a major asset manager and a public-chain foundation – duly reinforced the feasibility of wide-scale tokenisation.
The final session widened the lens to technology and to uses beyond conventional finance: Martin Halford of Polymath on confidential assets and the next phase of institutional tokenisation, and Jamie Ball on bringing the global disaster-insurance market on-chain. ENODA’s own Eva Jovanova spoke on tokenising the energy grid and highlighted that the asset most in need of a neutral, real-time settlement layer is the grid itself. The session (and the summit) finished with Dr. Lisa Cameron talking about the work the UK US Alliance has been doing and what the UK could learn about tokenisation from the US.
What stayed with us, more than any one single talk, was the synergy in the room. Tokenisation has spent years as a conversation held in separate camps: banks in one, public-chain communities in another, regulators and lawyers in a third, energy almost nowhere. By bringing these independent thinkers together in Scotland, Blockchain Scotland created the conditions for a richer and more nuanced discussion than any single perspective could have offered.
Engaging with this group is hugely beneficial to ENODA, building on our work with Blockchain Scotland and our participation in the European Blockchain Regulatory Sandbox (Cohort 3). Many of the discussions across the summit reflected our own views on the future of the sector: that meaningful progress will come through collaboration and cross-industry engagement. Our thanks to Blockchain Scotland and Maciej Zurawski for facilitating the event, and to everyone we met across the day.