The Tokenization Wave is Here. The Payments Rail Isn't Yet.
Why shared standards, not better technology, will determine whether the next wave of digital asset adoption reaches the shore.
Disclaimer: These are my observations and opinions, not financial advice. I’m a member of the Blockchain Payments Consortium.
In 2022, Maersk and IBM shut down TradeLens, their blockchain-enabled global trade platform, not because the technology had failed. The platform had captured over 154 million shipping events, flowing through ports from Rotterdam to Bilbao and customs authorities across five continents. The data was flowing.
They shut it down because, as Maersk’s head of business platforms put it, “the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved.” What strikes me about this is that Bridget van Kralingen, IBM’s Senior Vice President of Global Industries, had diagnosed the problem four years earlier, at the platform’s very launch: success, she said, “rests on a single factor: bringing the entire ecosystem together around a common approach that benefits all participants equally.”
They knew what was required. They built impressive technology. And they still could not solve it.
I am writing this because I believe we are standing at the edge of a second wave of tokenization, and I want us to think carefully about what will make the difference this time. Shipping is the most vivid example of the coordination problem, but the same failure is playing out across trade finance, cross-border commerce, and capital markets broadly.
The wave is real, and further along than most people realize
Tokenization is no longer a proof of concept. It is becoming infrastructure. Across Europe, the EU’s DLT Pilot Regime is allowing regulated institutions to issue, trade, and settle tokenized securities on distributed ledgers under proper oversight. In October 2025, ODDO BHF, one of Europe’s largest independent financial groups, launched EUROD, a MiCA-compliant, euro-backed stablecoin, signalling that major institutions are no longer waiting for the rails to be built before they issue on them. The demand waiting on the other side is staggering: the Asian Development Bank estimates the global trade finance gap at $2.5 trillion. That is real assets, real transactions, real businesses still waiting for capital locked in slow, paper-heavy processes.
The technology has caught up. The regulatory environment, at least in Europe, is beginning to follow. And yet, to be precise, the gap between a tokenized asset and a tokenized transaction remains wide.
Across trade finance and cross-border commerce, we are getting better at digitizing the document: the bill of lading, the letter of credit, the invoice. What we have not solved is what happens when that document changes hands. Which payment moves with it, how fast, on which network, and under what compliance standard? In most cases today, the answer still involves a manual step, a wire transfer, and at least one correspondent bank that has no idea the underlying asset was digital to begin with.
We have digitized the paperwork. We have not digitized the transaction.
The problem was never the technology, and the lesson changes entirely depending on whether you believe that
When I look at TradeLens, I do not see a technology failure. I see a standards gap, and the distinction matters enormously because the remedy changes entirely depending on which one it is.
If the technology failed, the answer is to build better technology. But if the coordination failed, if the ecosystem could not align on a common approach, then the answer is to build the layer of shared standards that makes coordination possible in the first place. These are very different problems, and conflating them is how we end up repeating the same cycle.
It’s a bit like what happened with email, or with the internet itself. TCP/IP did not make email faster, it made email universal, because it gave every network a common language so that a message sent from one system could be received by any other. The protocols did not slow the internet down. They created the conditions under which it could grow at all. Standards, in other words, are not a constraint on innovation. They are what turns innovation into adoption.
The problem, then, was never whether blockchain could work in global trade. The problem was always who would agree on the language it speaks, and that is a problem that better technology alone cannot fix.
The ICC’s Digital Standards Initiative has been doing precisely this kind of work for trade documents, building a framework to connect the 36 key documents that underpin global commerce, from letters of credit to bills of lading across different platforms and networks. That is the data layer. What the industry still lacks is the equivalent for the payment layer: a common set of standards that allows a stablecoin settlement on one network to be trusted, recognized, and received by a counterparty on another. The gap between the data layer and the payment layer is, I believe, the central unsolved problem for the next wave of tokenization.
Europe’s window, and Europe’s risk
I am writing this from Europe, and I want to be honest about both the opportunity and the risk we face here.
The opportunity is real. MiCA is the world’s first comprehensive, unified regulatory framework for crypto-assets, covering everything from stablecoin issuers to exchanges under a single set of rules across 27 member states. The United States has made significant strides with the GENIUS Act, which brings payment stablecoins into a federal regulatory perimeter for the first time, but it remains narrower in scope. The DLT Pilot Regime gives institutions a legitimate, supervised environment to build and test. European firms are moving: EUROD is one concrete example, and it will not be the last. Peter Kerstens, advisor to the European Commission, has put the stakes plainly: “In the race to establish dominance in DLT, we don’t want Europe to become a flyover zone between the U.S., the Middle East, and Asia.”
He is right to flag the risk. Having good regulation is not enough if the payment rails that run on top of it are fragmented. MiCA creates legal clarity for stablecoin issuers across 27 member states, but if each national implementation produces its own compliance variant, its own data format, its own settlement logic, we will have recreated exactly the problem TradeLens ran into: a technically sound system that the broader ecosystem cannot align around.
The shipping industry is a useful mirror here. It is one of the most genuinely global industries in existence, moving roughly 80% of world trade across dozens of jurisdictions simultaneously, and it is precisely the industry where we have seen the most ambitious blockchain platforms built and the most instructive failures of ecosystem coordination. The technology works. The alignment does not yet.
What BPC is building, and why it has to happen on three fronts at once
That is the coordination gap BPC was founded to close. Our founding members collectively represent over $10 trillion in annual stablecoin transaction volume: Fireblocks, Polygon Labs, Mysten Labs, the Monad Foundation, the Solana Foundation, the Stellar Development Foundation, and the TON Foundation. We did not come together because we agreed on everything. We came together because we agreed on one thing: the ecosystem cannot scale on fragmented rails.
Our work is organized across three fronts. The first is technical standards, the cross-chain interoperability protocols and standardized APIs that allow stablecoin settlement to work across networks without requiring every counterparty to rebuild from scratch. The second is compliance frameworks, a shared approach to KYC, AML, and regulatory reporting that works across jurisdictions, so that a payment that is compliant in Frankfurt is recognizable as compliant in Athens or Singapore. The third is institutional integration, working directly with financial institutions and regulators to ensure that these standards connect to existing infrastructure rather than ask institutions to abandon it.
This last point matters more than it might initially seem. BPC is working directly with regulators and central bank authorities to make the case that stablecoin access to central bank infrastructure is a necessary next step for genuine interoperability. Standards without regulatory anchoring are, at best, guidelines: things individual actors adopt when it is convenient and set aside when it is not. The work has to happen in the regulatory space and the technical space simultaneously, or it will not hold.
For a European financial institution today, that means a compliance framework that lets a payment cleared in Frankfurt be recognised as compliant in Athens or Singapore without rebuilding from scratch for every jurisdiction. For a European regulator, it means technical standards that connect to existing MiCA requirements rather than running alongside them as a parallel system. BPC’s recently published Definition of a Payment is a first concrete step in that direction: a cross-chain taxonomy that establishes, for the first time, a common set of data points, from transaction type and merchant classification to KYC signals and geolocation, that allow any on-chain payment to be identified, described and assessed consistently across networks. It is an open draft, explicitly designed to evolve through input from regulators and financial institutions. That is not a limitation. That is the point: building the standard collaboratively, so that when it is adopted, it holds.
The next TradeLens is already being built. Whether it succeeds or fails will not come down to the ambition of the founders or the sophistication of the technology. It will come down to whether the ecosystem can agree on a common language before the next round of fragmentation locks in.
That window is open. It will not stay open indefinitely.