HM Treasury Spotlights Hedera as UK Tokenization Benchmark in £33 Billion Wholesale Markets Push

On July 13, 2026, Chris Woolard, HM Treasury's Wholesale Digital Markets Champion, delivered the UK government's first formal roadmap for migrating wholesale financial markets to blockchain infrastructure. The strategy document, backed by the City of London Corporation, quantifies the economic opportunity at £33 billion in additional annual economic output and £14 billion in yearly tax revenue by 2035—contingent upon rapid infrastructure deployment. These figures derive from modeling by Barclays, PwC, and Boston Consulting Group and represent the government's central thesis for why tokenization of real-world assets represents a structural competitive advantage for UK financial markets.

The roadmap establishes concrete operational milestones. The Digital Gilt Instrument (DIGIT) pilot, which would make the UK the first G7 country to issue a blockchain-native government bond, is scheduled for its first issuance in Q1 2027. HSBC was appointed as platform provider in February 2026 and is operating the pilot on its Orion platform within the Bank of England's Digital Securities Sandbox—a supervised environment comprising 16 approved firms including Euroclear and the London Stock Exchange Group. This structure allows live testing of tokenized issuance, trading, and settlement under regulatory oversight.

The UK government has mobilized a cross-industry taskforce of 54 firms to execute the roadmap's technical and compliance requirements. Participants include major institutional investors (BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan), traditional banking infrastructure (HSBC, Euroclear), cryptocurrency and stablecoin platforms (Coinbase, Circle, Ripple), and exchanges (London Stock Exchange Group). These firms are organized into nine action groups covering primary issuance, tokenized collateral, tokenized funds, payment rails, legal certainty, and financial crime compliance. The taskforce has set spring 2027 as the target date for executing the first live, end-to-end tokenized repo transaction—a critical proof-of-concept demonstrating the viability of settlement using stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits, and central bank money.

The ambition reflects a substantial market opportunity: tokenized real-world assets are currently estimated between $23 billion and $36 billion globally, but projections from major consulting firms suggest the market could reach $88 trillion by 2035. The UK roadmap positions the country's regulatory framework and financial infrastructure as a foundation for capturing a meaningful share of this growth, contingent upon successful execution of the DIGIT pilot and demonstration of interoperable settlement mechanisms across the taskforce's action groups.