The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) devotes a chapter of its Annual Economic Report to tokenization, describing it as 'the next logical step' in the evolution of the monetary and financial system. The BIS envisions a 'unified ledger' where tokenized central bank money, commercial bank deposits and real-world assets coexist on programmable infrastructure.
Tokenization, the report argues, is not merely digitization. By binding assets to programmable smart contracts, it enables atomic settlement—payment-versus-payment (PvP) in FX and delivery-versus-payment (DvP) in securities—eliminating the settlement risk that has historically required intermediaries and liquidity buffers.
The BIS points to Project Agorá, Project Mariana and Project Pyxtrial as concrete experiments demonstrating that wholesale CBDCs, tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins can interoperate. Early results show step-change improvements in settlement time and capital efficiency for correspondent banking flows.
Nonetheless, the report is candid about the challenges: legal finality across jurisdictions, cyber-resilience of shared ledgers, governance of on-chain identity and privacy, and the risk of platform fragmentation. Without common standards, tokenization could recreate today's silos in a more complex form.
For infrastructure providers such as ZeroLink, the BIS report reinforces the strategic direction of building compliant bridges between traditional banking rails and tokenized asset networks, ensuring institutional clients can access programmable settlement without sacrificing regulatory certainty.
