Natalya Thakur

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Knova

Natalya Thakur is the Founder and CEO of Knova, enterprise software that unifies traditional and tokenized assets into a single operating layer. She has held roles across leading financial and technology organizations, including BlackRock, Google[X], Celo, IDEO CoLab, Morgan Stanley, and the Hoover Institution under Dr. Condoleezza Rice. She also co-founded Stanford’s Future of Digital Currency Initiative, a partnership with the United Nations, and serves in leadership at the Bretton Woods Committee, helping advance its digital asset and future-of-finance agenda.

A frequent public speaker and active angel investor/LP, her work has been featured in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, American Banker, NYSE Floor Talk, CoinDesk, and BIS publications. She was recently named a finalist for the 2025 UBS Female Founders Award, and was featured in the 2024 Women in Fintech Powerlist, Standout 45 for Senior Leaders.

Thakur holds a BA (Honors) in International Relations from Stanford University, an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Speaking at

12:00–1:30pmThu 25 JunGFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 2, Ground FloorOpen
Blueprint for Digital Assets

Building a Practitioner's Guide for Tokenization in Finance: Working Group Members Convening

GFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 2, Ground FloorOpen
About this session

The problems that constrain tokenization at scale do not belong to one working group, one institution, or one regulatory perimeter. Cross-ledger settlement, stablecoin licensing fragmentation, FMI readiness in developing markets, and the legal enforceability of smart contracts are structurally connected with each a precondition for the next, each requiring actors across infrastructure and regulation to work from the same evidence base.
This session brings both working groups together for the first time in person. Working Group 1 (Interoperability and Infrastructure) and Working Group 2 (Regulation, Trust, and Governance) will each present their problem statements before presenting to the Oversight Panel. The purpose is to establish shared understanding of the initiative's full scope, test framing with peers who approach the same challenges from different vantage points, and sharpen the asks that each working group will direct to the Oversight Panel in the session that follows.
About the initiative
GFTN has launched _Tokenization in Finance: Evidence and Implementation Pathways_, a structured, multi-stakeholder initiative convening two working groups drawn from leading financial institutions, infrastructure providers, and market participants to assemble a practitioner-oriented evidence base spanning spanning digital money and payment rails through to tokenized real-world assets, securities, funds, and capital markets infrastructure. At Singapore FinTech Festival in November 2026, the initiative will publish a practitioner guide designed to give financial institutions a structured basis for sequencing their digital asset strategies, and to equip regulators and finance ministries in emerging and developing economies with implementation pathways they can draw on directly.
2:00–3:30pmThu 25 JunGFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 3, Ground FloorOpen
Blueprint for Digital Assets

Navigating the New Digital Order: Regulatory Divergence, Monetary Architecture, and a Path toward Coordination

GFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 3, Ground FloorOpen
About this session

Digital assets, programmable money, and AI-driven transactions are crossing borders at increased speed. But the rules governing them are being written jurisdiction by jurisdiction, with no shared architecture in sight. As the US advances GENIUS Act rules for private-sector stablecoins, the EU deepens MiCA and pursues a digital euro, and China scales its state-backed e-CNY, three major economies are building divergent governance frameworks around one underlying technology — with significant implications for cross-border payments, monetary policy transmission, and AI in the global financial system.
This policy divergence is a compliance challenge for market participants, but it is also the early stage of a structural buildup. When domestically rational policy choices generate internationally costly spillovers — and when no coordinating mechanism exists to manage them — fragmentation compounds over time until the cost of inaction becomes prohibitive. Digital currencies and AI governance are following this trajectory, and while the window to get ahead of it remains open, it is closing.
Against this backdrop, the Bretton Woods Committee will convene a closed roundtable at Point Zero Forum on Thursday, June 25th to bring together global policymakers, central bankers, regulators, and private sector leaders to stress-test the diagnosis. This discussion will directly inform the Bretton Woods Committee's upcoming work, with a focus on the defining digital governance challenge of the moment: whether coordination across jurisdictions can accelerate to match the digital rails being built beneath the global financial system.
The roundtable will be a 90-minute discussion featuring 10 minutes of scene-setting remarks from featured speakers, followed by an open exchange among the broader group. A brief framing paper will be circulated in advance. The core question animating the discussion: What are the costs of continued fragmentation — and what global coordination mechanisms are necessary to manage the associated risks and opportunities?
2:00–3:30pmThu 25 JunGFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 2, Ground FloorOpen
Blueprint for Digital Assets

Building a Practitioner's Guide for Tokenization in Finance: Oversight Panel Convening

GFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 2, Ground FloorOpen
About this session

Tokenization is reshaping financial infrastructure across many economies. The decisions that are being made now on architecture, standards and governance will determine whether that infrastructure serves developed and emerging and developing economies, or leaves some behind. Ensuring that outcome requires senior public sector voices at the centre of these conversations.
This session brings both working groups and the public sector Oversight Panel together for the first time. Working group leads will present their confirmed problem statements on what the evidence shows, and receive feedback and recommendations that working groups will pursue to build the practitioner's guide that will publish at Singapore FinTech Festival in November 2026.
About the initiative
GFTN is launching _Tokenization in Finance: Evidence and Implementation Pathways_, a structured, multi-stakeholder initiative convening two working groups drawn from leading financial institutions, infrastructure providers, and market participants to assemble a practitioner-oriented evidence base spanning spanning digital money and payment rails through to tokenized real-world assets, securities, funds, and capital markets infrastructure. At Singapore FinTech Festival in November 2026, the initiative will publish a practitioner guide designed to give financial institutions a structured basis for sequencing their digital asset strategies, and to equip regulators and finance ministries in emerging and developing economies with implementation pathways they can draw on directly.

Featured speakers

Hosted by

Natalya Thakur

Speaking at

Building a Practitioner's Guide for Tokenization in Finance: Working Group Members Convening

Navigating the New Digital Order: Regulatory Divergence, Monetary Architecture, and a Path toward Coordination

Building a Practitioner's Guide for Tokenization in Finance: Oversight Panel Convening