What are the common challenges startups face in equity tokenisation?

The most common challenges include navigating FCA regulatory requirements, selecting the right tokenisation platform, structuring the legal framework for tokenised equity, educating investors unfamiliar with digital securities, and ensuring compliance with the UK Digital Securities Sandbox rules.

What are tokenisation platforms and how do they work?

Tokenisation platforms are regulated technology providers that convert equity or other assets into digital tokens on a blockchain or distributed ledger. In the UK, platforms operating under FCA oversight include those participating in the Digital Securities Sandbox. They handle the technical issuance, custody, and transfer of tokenised securities.

What financial insights should founders know before tokenising equity?

Founders should understand the cost structure of tokenisation (legal, platform, and compliance fees), the valuation implications of fractional ownership, how tokenised equity differs from traditional equity crowdfunding, and the tax treatment of digital securities under UK law.

What investor strategies apply to tokenised equity?

Investors in tokenised equity can benefit from fractional ownership of high-value assets, improved liquidity through secondary market trading on regulated platforms, portfolio diversification across early-stage UK startups, and participation in deals previously accessible only to institutional investors.

What is the UK regulatory landscape for equity tokenisation?

The UK regulatory landscape is governed primarily by the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) and HM Treasury. Key frameworks include the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023, the Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS), and ongoing FCA consultations on the treatment of tokenised securities. The UK is positioning itself as a global leader in regulated digital securities.

What is equity tokenisation?

Equity tokenisation is the process of converting ownership rights in a company into digital tokens recorded on a blockchain or distributed ledger. These tokens represent shares or equity stakes and can be transferred, traded, or held digitally, subject to regulatory compliance. In the UK, tokenised equity is treated as a regulated financial instrument under FCA oversight.

Digital Securities for UK Startups

Latest Headline

SEIS, EIS and Tokenisation: What We Know, and What We Don't

A plain English guide for founders and investors. Part of our intelligence series on equity tokenisation in the UK.

INVESTING AND FINANCE

Shawn Jhanji

5 days ago7 min read

For most early-stage investors in the UK, SEIS and EIS are not a footnote. They are often the reason the cheque gets written, so whenever the conversation turns to tokenising startup equity, the first sensible question is also the hardest: what happens to the tax reliefs? This guide sets out what can be said with reasonable confidence today, and what is still genuinely open. It assumes no prior knowledge. Where a term has a specific meaning, we explain it in plain English as we go. One thing to say clearly before we start. We are piecing this together too and while many opinions exist, nobody yet has a finished, tested rulebook for tokenised equity under SEIS and EIS yet. In reality, the live examples are only now starting to emerge. What follows is our current interpretation, drawn from the rules as they stand, from conversations we have been having with regulators and lawyers, and from our own work in the space. It is a considered view, not a final answer, and we will tell

RWA & TOKENISATION

A decade ago, tokenising a listed share was treated as an ambitious proof of concept. Today, the question is no longer whether it can be done, but how quickly. This week provided one of the clearest demonstrations yet. Within hours of South Korean semiconductor giant SK Hynix's $26.5 billion Nasdaq debut, tokenised versions of its shares were already available across multiple blockchain networks. For UK founders and investors watching the evolution of private market infrastructure, that speed matters. It offers a glimpse of what mature tokenisation plumbing looks like when issuance, distribution and settlement begin to operate almost simultaneously. While the UK's own market is taking a deliberately measured path through the FCA's fund tokenisation framework and the new PISCES market, the underlying challenge is ultimately the same: how quickly can ownership move once an asset exists?

Hours, Not Months: Ondo Brings $26.5bn SK Hynix Listing On-Chain Across Three Networks

South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix raised $26.5bn in an oversubscribed American depositary receipt sale that began trading on Nasdaq on Friday, and within the same trading window tokenised versions of its stock were already live across three separate blockchain networks. Ondo Finance issued the tokenis

Shawn Jhanji

2 hours ago4 min read

For founders and investors in the UK watching how tokenised equity infrastructure matures elsewhere, a partnership announced on 8 July between two US tokenisation specialists offers a useful signal. The biggest obstacle to broker dealer adoption has rarely been the technology. It has been the regulatory and operational plumbing around it. Dinari and tZERO said they are joining forces to build a turnkey platform that packages issuance, trading, custody, settlement and shareholder servicing into a single regulated framework for tokenised US equities. Dinari operates the dShares Financial Network, where each token represents a one to one ownership claim on an underlying US listed share, such as dAAPL backed by Apple stock or dTSLA backed by Tesla stock. tZERO brings the regulatory scaffolding, operating under SEC and FINRA oversight and providing the clearing, settlement and custody infrastructure a broker dealer needs to offer tokenised shares without building that stack itself.

Dinari and tZERO Partner to Give US Broker-Dealers a Turnkey Route Into Tokenised Equities

For founders and investors in the UK watching how tokenised equity infrastructure matures elsewhere, a partnership announced on 8 July between two US tokenisation specialists offers a useful signal. The biggest obstacle to broker dealer adoption has rarely been the technology. It has been the regula

Shawn Jhanji

4 days ago2 min read

Barclays published a report with PwC on 9 July putting a number on something the UK tokenisation sector has mostly argued from instinct rather than evidence: what the technology is actually worth to the country. The answer, according to "Rewiring Finance: Tokenisation as a Catalyst for UK Growth", is up to £33bn in additional GDP per year by 2035, with roughly two thirds of that benefit landing outside financial services altogether. Just think about that, Most tokenisation coverage, including plenty of it on this site, treats the technology as a financial services story: settlement speed, collateral mobility, fund structures. Barclays and PwC are making a different claim and using a computable general equilibrium model across six use cases, government bonds, fund management, foreign exchange, trade finance, real estate and corporate bonds, they estimate the productivity gains 'ripple' into the wider economy through lower transaction costs, an estimated £11bn increase in investment

Barclays and PwC Say Tokenisation Could Add £33bn a Year to UK GDP by 2035, With Two Thirds Reaching Beyond Financial Services

Barclays published a report with PwC on 9 July putting a number on something the UK tokenisation sector has mostly argued from instinct rather than evidence: what the technology is actually worth to the country. The answer, according to "Rewiring Finance: Tokenisation as a Catalyst for UK Growth", is up to £33bn in additional GDP per year by 2035, with roughly two thirds of that benefit landing outside financial services altogether. Just think about that, Most tokenisation c

Shawn Jhanji

5 days ago5 min read

INVESTING & FINANCE

Another SEIS fund has reached capacity. On its own, that is hardly remarkable. Haatch Ventures has now closed its fourteenth Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) fund after reaching its £4.5 million hard cap, continuing a run that the manager says has seen each of its last five SEIS funds fully subscribed. The more interesting story is what that says about the UK funding market. For months, founders have been hearing that early-stage capital is becoming harder to access. The British Business Bank's Small Business Equity Tracker 2026 found seed-stage deal volumes fell by 27 per cent year-on-year, even as overall equity investment was propped up by a relatively small number of large AI transactions. Yet investor appetite for professionally managed SEIS funds appears remarkably resilient. That apparent contradiction deserves attention. What happened? Haatch's SEIS Fund 14 closed to new investment on 11 July after reaching its £4.5 million hard cap, just two days after

Haatch Sells Out Another £4.5m SEIS Fund. The Bigger Question Is What Happens to All That Capital Next.

Haatch Ventures has closed its fourteenth Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme fund after hitting its £4.5 million hard cap, the pre-seed B2B SaaS investor told backers on 11 July, two days after flagging that only £500,000 of headroom remained in a raise it runs partly through Crowdcube.

Shawn Jhanji

2 hours ago4 min read

HSBC has completed the private placement of its first digitally native structured product, a USD denominated note issued directly on a blockchain out of Hong Kong rather than digitised after the fact from a paper process. Marketnode, the Asia Pacific digital market infrastructure operator, acted as both tokenisation agent and digital paying agent, handling the payment flows between issuer and investor. The relationship is closer than a typical vendor arrangement. HSBC led Marketnode's Series A in May 2024 and holds a board seat. Marketnode began life as a joint venture between Singapore Exchange and Temasek, with Euroclear investing in late 2024, which makes this issuance as much a proof point for HSBC's own infrastructure bet as it is a product launch.

HSBC Issues Its First Digitally Native Structured Product Through Marketnode in Hong Kong

Structured products are a mainstay of Asian wealth portfolios, and HSBC is one of the region's largest issuers of them. That makes the efficiency case unusually strong. Popular products such as autocallables and equity linked notes have busy lifecycles, with observation dates, coupon triggers and early redemption events that are currently tracked and reconciled separately by the issuer, paying agents and distributors. A digitally native note makes the token itself the single

Shawn Jhanji

11 hours ago3 min read

SEIS, EIS and Tokenisation: What We Know, and What We Don't

A plain English guide for founders and investors. Part of our intelligence series on equity tokenisation in the UK.

Shawn Jhanji

5 days ago7 min read

Startup News

Every founder who has walked away from an investment meeting wondering why one individual, or one investment committee, ultimately decided the future of their business has encountered a governance problem disguised as a fundraising problem. Capital formation has always been about more than money. It is about who gets to make decisions, how trust is earned, and what happens when those making those decisions no longer reflect the interests of the people they serve. Those questions sit at the heart of venture capital, evergreen funds and, increasingly, tokenised investment structures. Which is why an experiment taking place thousands of miles away in community treasuries across New Zealand, Australia and here in the UK deserves more attention than its modest setting might suggest. Mark Pascall, co-founder of The Wellbeing Protocol, recently published an account of governance experiments being run through hum, a platform managing shared community treasuries. Although these are not

A New Zealand Community Treasury Experiment Reopens an Important Question for Venture Funds

Mark Pascall, co-founder of The Wellbeing Protocol, recently published an account of governance experiments being run through hum, a platform managing shared community treasuries. Although these are not investment funds, they are managing a familiar problem: how groups decide where capital should be allocated. The first governance model, Gov1, was straightforward where every member could propose spending and every member voted equally. In theory it was highly democratic. I

Shawn Jhanji

12 hours ago5 min read

Picture two founders, both running businesses that make money and make a difference. One has built a climate hardware company and can issue shares like any other startup. The other runs a care provider structured as a Community Interest Company, with an asset lock and a dividend cap baked into its constitution from day one. Both are growing. Only one of them can meaningfully raise equity to do it faster. That split sits at the centre of a new census published this week by consultancy Allia Impact and market intelligence firm Beauhurst Insights, the first attempt to count the UK's mission-led business population using verified Companies House data rather than surveys and estimates. The findings, set out in a report titled The Impact Business Tipping Point, are a genuine surprise. There are more than 151,000 mission-led businesses trading in the UK, generating around £37 billion in annual turnover and supporting 1.12 million jobs. Since 2016 that population has grown by ro

UK's 150,000 Mission-Led Businesses Are Growing Faster Than the Wider Economy, but Their Own Legal Structures Are Shutting Them Out of Capital

Picture two founders, both running businesses that make money and make a difference. One has built a climate hardware company and can issue shares like any other startup. The other runs a care provider structured as a Community Interest Company, with an asset lock and a dividend cap baked into its c

Shawn Jhanji

4 days ago5 min read

Illustrated editorial image in a wartime newspaper sketch style showing a large A-board headline announcing that AI captured 44% of UK startup equity in 2025 while seed funding declined, symbolising the concentration of venture capital into artificial intelligence and the challenges facing early-stage startup fundraising in the UK.

AI Took a Record 44 Per Cent of UK Startup Equity in 2025 as Seed Funding Fell, British Business Bank Data Shows

Picture a founder outside the story everyone is telling. She is not building a large language model. She is building a climate hardware business in Sheffield, or a healthtech tool in Cardiff, with early revenue and a plan to grow. This week the British Business Bank published the numbers that descri

Shawn Jhanji

6 days ago5 min read

Law & regulation

For anyone in the UK still waiting to see whether tokenisation talk turns into tokenisation infrastructure, 13 July gave the clearest answer so far. Chris Woolard CBE, HM Treasury's Wholesale Digital Markets Champion, published his first report to the Chancellor, and it arrives with a taskforce of 54 firms behind it, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and UBS. The group is backed by the City of London Corporation and will spend the next year working on live tokenisation use cases across UK financial markets, starting with tokenised repo. Woolard, who spent eight years as chair of the Financial Conduct Authority before taking on the Champion role in April, is addressing the report to whoever holds the Chancellor's job next, a reminder that this is being built to outlast any one minister. The headline numbers are designed to focus minds. Woolard's report estimates that wider tokenisation could add up to £33 billion to UK annual economic output and £1

UK Launches 54-Firm Tokenisation Taskforce Led by Chris Woolard and Wall Street Giants

The group is backed by the City of London Corporation and will spend the next year working on live tokenisation use cases across UK financial markets, starting with tokenised repo. Woolard, who spent eight years as chair of the Financial Conduct Authority before taking on the Champion role in April, is addressing the report to whoever holds the Chancellor's job next, a reminder that this is being built to outlast any one minister. The headline numbers are designed to focus mi

Shawn Jhanji

11 hours ago4 min read

The story of UK tokenisation this year has been a story of vision documents. On 18 May the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England, with the Prudential Regulation Authority alongside them, published a joint Call for Input titled The Future of Tokenisation, setting out how they think tokenised assets should be issued, traded and settled across UK wholesale markets. The window for responses closed on 3 July. On 6 July the industry body CryptoUK published its own submission, and buried in it is the question every founder and adviser watching this space should care about: not what the regulators want to build, but when, in what order, and who owns each piece.

CryptoUK Urges FCA and Bank of England to Publish a Tokenisation Delivery Map as It Files Its Call for Input Response

CryptoUK is the trade association for the UK cryptoasset and digital finance sector, and its response is worth reading precisely because it stops short of applause. The vision, it agrees, is the right one. Tokenisation can cut reconciliation costs, speed up settlement and collateral movement, strengthen ownership records and open up new issuance and post trade models. The practical issue, as CryptoUK frames it, is whether any of that can be translated into the concrete things

Shawn Jhanji

6 days ago4 min read

Founder studying a map while overlooking a vast maze leading towards London's financial district, symbolising the new FCA and Bank of England regulatory roadmap for tokenisation, digital assets and UK startup finance.

What the FCA and Bank of England's 30 June Package Means for Tokenisation Founders and Investors.

For years, anyone building in tokenisation in the UK has had to plan around a moving target. The rules were coming, everyone agreed, but their shape was a matter of consultation papers and educated guesses. That ended on 30 June, when the Financial Conduct Authority published the final rules and gui

Luca Bellavita

Jul 25 min read

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THE LEGAL VIEW

Going down the rabbit hole: an introduction to tokenised equity

For founders and investors. If you are a founder weighing up whether to tokenise your equity, or an investor trying to work out what you would actually be buying, this is the place to start. From a legal perspective, it covers: how tokenised equity works, what changes, what does not, and where the rules are heading. Tokenisation is a concept often met with much hype and little knowledge. At its core it is simple. A cryptoasset token is just shorthand for data held on-chai

Jun 304 min read

Shifting sands: a potential new world order for RWAs

An RWA, or real world asset, is a cryptoasset that represents something that exists off the blockchain: a share, a bond, a building, even a stock of uranium. The idea has been around for a decade, but in recent months it has moved to the centre of the conversation. That is partly new use cases with real value, such as tokenised uranium, which allows investment without ever taking delivery. It is partly better infrastructure, such as stablecoins making settlement more reliab

Jun 105 min read

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Read Mopre Articles

A New Zealand Community Treasury Experiment Reopens an Important Question for Venture Funds

Barclays and PwC Say Tokenisation Could Add £33bn a Year to UK GDP by 2035, With Two Thirds Reaching Beyond Financial Services

Earlier this week, UK Finance published a report, written by Oliver Wyman, with a blunt headline finding: Britain is behind other jurisdictions on securities tokenisation. It is a fair verdict on the scoreboard. Most of the live issuance and pilot activity to date has happened elsewhere, and the United States in particular. After spending Tuesday at the London Blockchain Institutional Tokenisation Summit, hosted at DLA Piper, I came away with a different feeling from the one the report leaves you with. Not a contradiction of it, but a serious counterweight. In a room full of asset managers, custodians, market makers, platforms and lawyers, the mood was neither hype nor anxiety. It was practical, curious, and quietly confident. The prevailing view was that the UK's regulatory environment, and the certainty now evolving alongside it, is creating a genuinely positive space for the sector to innovate and scale. More than that, several people framed the UK not as a laggard but as a juris

The Institutional Tokenisation Summit Suggests the UK Is Closer Than It Looks

After spending Tuesday at the London Blockchain Institutional Tokenisation Summit, hosted at DLA Piper, I came away with a different feeling from the one the report leaves you with. Not a contradiction of it, but a serious counterweight. In a room full of asset managers, custodians, market makers, platforms and lawyers, the mood was neither hype nor anxiety. It was practical, curious, and quietly confident. The prevailing view was that the UK's regulatory environment, and the

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The Institutional Tokenisation Summit Suggests the UK Is Closer Than It Looks

AI Took a Record 44 Per Cent of UK Startup Equity in 2025 as Seed Funding Fell, British Business Bank Data Shows

Wayve Files an $85m Employee Share Sale on London's PISCES, the First Big Test of Britain's Private Market

For years the frustration voiced by British founders and the people who build alongside them has been the same. You can grow a company worth billions in London and still find that nobody who helped create that value can realise any of it, short of selling to an overseas buyer or waiting out an IPO t

Conceptual editorial illustration showing a modern glass financial exchange above ground with an underground network of old and new copper pipes carrying glowing streams of light. Traditional hand-operated valves contrast with seamless modern infrastructure, symbolising the evolution of financial market settlement, tokenisation and the hidden plumbing of capital markets.

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