Building the Plumbing: Infrastructure for Institutional Digital Money

Institutional adoption of digital money and tokenised assets is not limited by appetite - it is limited by infrastructure. Custody architecture for tokenised instruments, interoperability between permissioned and public chains, connectivity to central bank settlement systems, and the absence of standardised APIs between token issuers and institutional counterparties are each slowing what should be straightforward integrations.

This roundtable goes beneath the strategy layer to examine the engineering and operational decisions that determine whether institutional digital money scales or stalls - from node operation and key management to oracle design and the unresolved question of who owns the middleware.

Participants will stress-test the current state of core infrastructure components: whether existing institutional custody solutions can genuinely support the asset variety and transaction velocity that tokenised markets require, how interoperability protocols like CCIP and IBC perform under institutional compliance constraints, and what the ISO 20022 migration means for institutions trying to integrate legacy messaging with on-chain settlement rails.

The session will also address the governance gap: the absence of shared standards for token issuance, redemption, and lifecycle management that is forcing every institution to solve the same engineering problem independently, and what a coordinated industry approach might actually require.