Report Library

This Citi Investor Services white paper, co-produced with The ValueExchange, argues that the tokenization of collateral has crossed from concept to operational reality, documenting five live case studies from institutions at the frontier of adoption. Drawing on original survey data covering global G-SIBs and asset managers, it finds that the average tier-one firm holds roughly $15 billion in idle, un-remunerated collateral annually and loses approximately $346 million per year in foregone income due to legacy settlement cut-offs and pre-funding requirements. The case studies cover: 24/7 margin management via tokenized cash at clearing houses; round-the-clock mobilization of US Treasuries for Asian CCPs without moving the underlying asset from the Federal Reserve; tokenized money market funds as yield-bearing, instantly pledgeable collateral (Franklin Templeton); Bitcoin-backed Digital Credit issuance at Strategy; and SIX's Digital Depositary Receipts for pre-IPO private equity. The report concludes that interoperable bank tokenized deposits (The Clearing House initiative) and the DTCC Tokenization Service launching October 2026 will be the next structural catalysts.

This joint white paper by Citi, Swift, and DTCC, released at Sibos Miami 2026, argues that institutional digital asset markets cannot scale through fragmented, parallel ecosystems — they require connectivity built on top of existing trusted financial infrastructure. The paper identifies interoperability and programmability as the twin enabling pillars: the first allows value (assets, cash, data) to move across traditional systems, private networks, and public blockchains; the second embeds compliance and operational logic directly into digital assets to automate servicing and settlement. It outlines how connecting traditional settlement infrastructure (DTCC, Swift) with digital-asset networks reduces fragmentation, supports 24/7 liquidity, and preserves regulatory protections — framing the role of banks and FMIs as the connective tissue rather than parallel competitors to newer digital rails.

This BIS Working Paper by Timothy Aerts, Ronald Heijmans, Jan Paulick, and Violeta Vuletic — drawing on the Mercurius dataset of 100 billion blockchain records built by De Nederlandsche Bank with the BIS Innovation Hub and Deutsche Bundesbank — demonstrates that widely used indicators of DeFi and stablecoin activity are highly sensitive to methodological choices, not just the underlying economics. The authors identify three structural sources of measurement divergence: the aggregation of Bitcoin transaction values under the UTXO model (where transfer estimates vary by up to sixfold depending on methodology), the proliferation of spurious smart contracts inflating Ethereum activity metrics, and the difficulty of comparing stablecoin use cases across chains with different architectures (Ethereum vs Tron). The paper argues that on-chain data, while fully public, requires careful cleaning and contextualisation before it can be used as a reliable indicator of economic activity, and provides guidance for researchers and policymakers on reading such data in context.

This WTO report, prepared jointly by the Trade in Services and Investment Division and the Economic Research Division, examines the role of stablecoins in international trade and cross-border payments. It finds that stablecoins currently account for roughly 3% of global cross-border payment volumes — up 35-fold from 2020 to mid-2024 — and that their potential to reduce the cost, speed, and friction of international payments is greatest for developing economies and remittance-heavy corridors. However, the report argues that the main constraint on wider adoption is regulatory fragmentation rather than technological limitations: misaligned national frameworks and poor interoperability with existing financial infrastructure are the primary barriers. It concludes that regulatory alignment across jurisdictions and deeper integration with existing payment networks will determine how much of stablecoins' trade-finance potential is realised.