The Agora: Institutions Take Center Stage at Kaiko’s Event in Cannes

The place to be: On Tuesday, blockchain data provider Kaiko hosted the first edition of “The Agora” at the Marriott Hotel in Cannes, on the sidelines of EthCC, the largest European gathering of the Ethereum ecosystem. The event featured more than 50 speakers from across DeFi and TradFi, including executives from Euroclear, Société Générale, Standard Chartered, DTCC, Fidelity, Amundi, and BPCE Group.

Strong institutional presence: What set Agora apart was the composition of the audience. European banks, large asset managers, and nearly all of the continent’s critical financial market infrastructures sat alongside digital asset companies and DeFi builders. The mood was energetic and forward-looking: the sense in the room was that the industry is moving past experimentation toward the scaling phase.

Money market funds as the litmus test: That conviction was most tangible in the day’s dominant topic: tokenized money market funds. Over the past two years, onchain issuance has grown from around $100 million to more than $9 billion, with players such as Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, Fidelity, and BlackRock already among the issuers. The use cases are well understood: more efficient collateral, better treasury management, 24/7 transferability. Yet adoption remains a fraction of the nearly $8 trillion market.

Assets without markets: Fidelity’s Cynthia Lo Bessette, Head of Digital Asset Management, offered the clearest diagnosis. The industry spent years proving that traditional assets can live onchain. What it did not build was the market around them: the platforms, the liquidity, the buy-side access that allow institutions to actually use these products.

• “Three, five years ago there really were quite a few POCs around how to demonstrate that you can credibly and safely represent a traditional asset onchain. But there was no market. There was no buy-side infrastructure and really there was no liquidity to facilitate the market for tokenized securities to be able to trade.”

Early steps: Jean-Jacques Barbéris, Deputy CEO of Amundi, confirmed the picture. Europe’s largest asset manager has been running experiments, testing different setups, and learning progressively. That approach is reflected in its first product: rather than launching a new fund, Amundi replicated an existing €5 billion money market fund on Ethereum in late 2025. Barbéris was clear that the industry will eventually have to move beyond this phase.

• “You need to have the underlyings on the blockchain. Without that, you’re just replicating onchain what is existing in the existing world.”

The cash question: As the day progressed, a related issue emerged: even where tokenized assets exist, there is still no clear consensus on what should be used for settlement. One key question is the role that stablecoins, currently the most operational form of onchain cash, will play alongside future tokenized deposits and wholesale CBDCs. With frameworks like the GENIUS Act in the U.S. and MiCA in Europe, market infrastructures are becoming increasingly comfortable with stablecoin-based settlement. Pierre Davoust, Head of Euronext Securities, argued that the debate is often framed too narrowly.

• “Some try to pit CBDCs against stablecoins. In reality, both serve different use cases. We need to be prepared for a setup where central bank money is used for part of the settlement activity, alongside stablecoins and tokenized deposits.”

Different solutions for different purposes: Andrew O’Neill, Managing Director and Digital Assets Analytical Lead at S&P Global, reinforced this point. Different forms of digital cash serve different purposes, and the institutions positioning themselves now are not choosing between them but preparing to offer all of them.

• “We don’t see it as a battle between stablecoins and tokenized deposits and central bank money. It’s horses for courses. Wholesale CBDC makes sense between banks and their central bank. Tokenized deposits fit within a single bank’s ecosystem. But anything aspiring to be open loop, anything structured as a fund or securitization, is most likely to work on the basis of stablecoins.”

For banks, O’Neill argued, the stablecoin buildout is less about payments revenue and more about strategic positioning: being able to serve clients in a tokenized world.

• “If you think about why banks are looking to issue stablecoins now, it’s not because they’re looking to profit on reserves. It’s a franchise play: to the extent that tokenization takes off, they need to be able to offer those products to clients.”

Onchain financial data: Beyond funds and settlement, a quieter but significant theme emerged in the afternoon: putting financial data itself onchain. As tokenized products scale, they need the same data traditional markets rely on: indices, benchmarks, credit ratings. Today, that data is distributed through separate licensing agreements, with reporting that is often delayed and sometimes disputed. Onchain, the data, the license, and the usage tracking can live in the same token.

Index data: Kaiko and S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that the iBoxx U.S. Treasuries Index has been tokenized on the Canton Network, giving institutional product issuers onchain access to the benchmark with embedded licensing and compliance features; they described it as the first major financial benchmark distributed this way.

• “We are interested in real life use cases. We’re getting pulled onchain by partners who have an application for those tokenized indices. For an IP issuer like ourselves, onchain means better auditability, visibility into how the IP is being used, and instantaneous reporting,” said Cameron Drinkwater, Chief Product and Operations Officer at S&P DJI.

A pattern emerging: S&P is not alone. Bloomberg is distributing its licensed pricing and reference data onchain for tokenized treasury and repo workflows. Two weeks earlier, Moody’s became the first credit rating agency to deliver credit insights onchain through its Token Integration Engine. According to our information, Ethereum and Solana are expected to follow Canton as target networks.

After hours: As the main program wrapped up, speakers and attendees moved to the rooftop terrace overlooking the Mediterranean for drinks and aperitivo. The contrast with some of the more crypto-native events around EthCC week was hard to miss: while many conversations reflected the weight of a bear market, the mood upstairs suggested that the institutional adoption curve is now running on its own clock.