Trends in Digital Assets in EU and UK 2026

This report tracks how digital assets are moving from experimentation to deployment, at very different speeds across asset classes and jurisdictions, with regulation the dominant variable shaping the pace of change.

On regulation, the EU’s Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation is now fully in force, and the market has largely adapted, though several exchanges, including Binance, have exited rather than seek an EU-wide licence. The UK’s dual FCA/Bank of England stablecoin regime takes effect in October 2027, a deliberate signal that the government wants Britain to be an attractive base for digital asset innovation, and the report benchmarks this against parallel frameworks in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the United States.

By asset class, fixed income is the clearest tokenisation success story, with DLT bond issuance reaching EUR 4.8 billion in 2025, led by Hong Kong’s HKD 12 billion HKMC digital bond, the largest to date. Repo and FX are tokenising quickly too: Broadridge’s Distributed Ledger Repo platform processed around USD 384 billion in December 2025 alone, a 490% year-on-year increase. Equities tokenisation, by contrast, remains negligible against a USD 115 trillion market that is already efficient.

Stablecoins emerge as the most consequential development for banks specifically. The market has grown to USD 300 billion, almost entirely dollar-denominated, and functions mainly as a route into and out of crypto trading and for business-to-business settlement rather than retail payments. Banks are responding by building their own tokenised deposit rails, including a Swift-enabled network and an early coalition building a euro-denominated stablecoin to compete with dollar dominance.

The report’s conclusion: traditional and decentralised finance are converging, largely on the banking industry’s own terms, with integration, not disruption, the defining theme.