Business leaders from both traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi) came together with entrepreneurs, lawyers, and regulators at a summit in London to explore how broader blockchain adoption can be achieved, coming to an overwhelming consensus that one of the main barriers is “interoperability,” not least between regulatory regimes.
On March 12, the second London Blockchain Finance Summit took place at the offices of Clifford Chance in London’s Canary Wharf finance district, an appropriate setting for the numerous banking, payments, finance, and blockchain executives who turned out to hash out the obstacles to scaling blockchain.
The event was ostensibly focused on “Payments & Digital Currencies,” but the drive of many of the day’s ten panels and keynotes revolved around two interconnected problems: How to improve interoperability between blockchains, the firms that transact in them, and the regulatory regimes that govern them; and how to “make the business case” to government and the established powerhouses of finance, that it is worth spending the necessary money to achieve this interoperability—despite it potentially being years before this investment bears fruit.
The diverse set of attendees appeared in almost unanimous agreement that regulatory clarity, unity, and interoperability are the key to unlocking blockchain adoption. Meanwhile, numerous speakers from both TradFi and DeFi touted the potential of distributed ledger technology (DLT) to improve collateral and capital efficiency by streamlining settlement processes, cutting out intermediaries, reducing reconciliation needs, and enabling more real-time visibility of assets.
Source: London Blockchain ConferenceThe summit is part of the broader “London Blockchain Conference” event ecosystem, an organization established with the goal of demonstrating how blockchain can, and in many cases already is, moving from concept to real-world enterprise and government implementation.
At this month’s “Payments & Digital Currencies” event, the overwhelming feeling was of a unified effort from the powerhouses of both TradFi and DeFi to achieve the promise of blockchain, solving the problem of interoperability, achieving regulatory clarity and consensus, and providing value to the macro economy.
New and old finance assembles
The summit hosted a range of household names from the traditional banking and finance sectors, among them NatWest (NASDAQ: NWG), Citibank (NASDAQ: C), Lloyds Banking Group (NASDAQ: LYG), Deutsche Bank (NASDAQ: DB), Barclays (NASDAQ: BCS), Mastercard (NASDAQ: MA), and the London Stock Exchange Group (NASDAQ: LSEGY). They were joined by a selection of leading DeFi players, including digital asset exchange ByBit, blockchain financial market infrastructure firms Tokenovate and Trace Finance, and crypto asset manager Hashdex.
This broad sweep of old and new finance was unified by an apparent shared desire to see blockchain technology become a mainstay of the finance sector, as well as a shared view of what is necessary to achieve this. Namely, greater interoperability.
This was outlined by the summit’s opening keynote, Head of Digital and Market Innovation at Lloyds Banking Group, Peter Left, who argued that money must work between institutions, and that the future needs the digital asset wallet.
He set the tone for the summit by advocating for adopting common open standards to avoid fragmentation, particularly in the realm of regulation—a point that became a common refrain throughout the day’s proceedings.
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Regulatory unity is a necessity
The overall tenor of the summit was optimism and excitement for the possibilities blockchain presents. However, multiple speakers also made it clear that blockchain will never be fully adopted by the big boys of finance until it has regulatory clarity and— crucially—regulatory unity.
In the words of one speaker, “regulation is the main driver for blockchain adoption,” therefore, there must be interoperability between the regulations governing blockchain around the world.
A major concern is the wildly differing regulatory frameworks and approaches globally, from the European Union’s landmark and bespoke Markets in Crypto Asset (MiCA) regulatory regime, to the faltering legislative efforts in the United States—somewhat improved after the passage of the GENIUS Act last July—and countries with little to no crypto regulation, such as India.
The fragmented state of global regulation causes uncertainty, which hampers innovators and blockchain entrepreneurs while putting off TradFi and banking institutions. As one of the summit speakers summed up: “Public blockchains don’t understand borders and a lot of friction is created by having to contend with different regulations in different jurisdictions.”
However, while some wait for greater global certainty and regulatory unity to take their slow course, others provide shoots of progress themselves.
One such example mentioned at the summit was the Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) Project Agorá, which is currently exploring a new way to process wholesale cross-border payments within existing regulatory parameters, using tokenization and other cutting-edge technologies such as smart contracts.
Deutsche Bank is part of Project Agorá, and their representative at the summit argued that this kind of collaboration between institutions is the essence of interoperability, ensuring that abstract concepts such as legality are standard and technologically neutral.
Lloyds’ Peter Left also underscored this message by pointing to the bank’s tokenized collateral pilot, successfully completed last July.
In a U.K. first, tokenized units of Aberdeen Investment’s (NASDAQ: SLFPF) money market fund (tMMF) and tokenized U.K. gilts were used as collateral for foreign exchange (FX) trades between Aberdeen Investments and Lloyds. These digital tokens were issued, transferred, and securely held by Archax, a U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)-regulated digital asset exchange, on the Hedera Hashgraph public permissioned blockchain.
“This groundbreaking initiative proves that digital assets can be used in regulated financial markets under existing legal frameworks here in the UK,” said Left, at the time. “It’s a major step forward in demonstrating how tokenization can enhance collateral efficiency, reduce friction, and unlock new trading opportunities.”
At the summit, he expanded on this by outlining his key takeaway from the success of the pilot: that existing legal frameworks applied, simply extended to a new asset; no new constructs were needed. In other words, English law already supports this kind of innovative product and transfer.
This sentiment was echoed by the U.K. regulator itself later in the day, as Victoria McLoughlin, Head of Digital Assets Payments & Digital Assets Directorate at the FCA, told summit attendees that the finance watchdog wants to support the growth of the industry by taking a measured and forward-thinking approach, rather than a “regulator says no” approach.
In practice, this takes the form of slotting digital assets into existing frameworks, whilst acknowledging that they can’t be regulated in exactly the same way as TradFi.
With this in mind, McLoughlin pointed to the FCA’s recently introduced stablecoin sandbox, which launched in November 2025 and allows firms active in the space to test how their stablecoin services work with proposed regulation, in a safe environment.
In February, the FCA announced the first cohort of firms selected to “test stablecoin products and help shape future regulation,” namely Monee Financial Technologies, ReStabilise, Revolut, and VVTX.
In a fireside chat at the summit, McLoughlin described the sandbox as a great opportunity to see how the products operate in practice and build a policy that works with them, noting that this is the first time the U.K. has had a live sandbox that actually informs policy decisions.
In short, the message from the regulatory side of the fence was one of support for blockchain innovation. Whether this inclination is the result of growing pressure from an increasingly pro-crypto executive and legislative class—a trend not limited to the U.K., having spread from a heavily pro-crypto U.S. in the Trump 2.0 era—is difficult to say.
Having regulators on board is certainly a positive, but in order to achieve greater adoption, blockchain advocates will also need to make a persuasive case to the TradFi elites, some of whom are already in effusive praise of the technology’s potential, such as those present at the London Blockchain summit, that it’s worth putting their money where their mouth is.
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Blockchain’s selling point
Possibly the number one selling point of blockchain technology, at least the one most oft repeated throughout the summit’s ten talks and panels, is its potential to free up access to collateral.
A major downside to the way traditional financial markets currently function is that capital often remains locked in illiquid assets, creating inefficiencies where value cannot be easily accessed, redeployed, or leveraged. This limits liquidity, slows transaction speeds, and prevents institutions and investors from maximizing the use of their collateral.
Tokenizing assets, on the other hand, enables real-time settlement and tracking on shared ledgers and can reduce intermediaries and operational buffers. This can allow institutions to move, reuse, or reallocate collateral much faster, negating the need to keep large amounts locked up as precautionary reserves.
This potential benefit was frequently highlighted throughout the summit and was the subject of one of the day’s most hotly attended panels, titled “Unlocking Mobile Collateral,” in which speakers from NatWest and Fidelity International discussed how blockchain could provide faster trades, “not tying up capital.”
The representative from NatWest was keen to point out that some projects, pilots, and trials are already showing that this is not a purely theoretical benefit. By way of example, he pointed to the European Central Bank’s (ECB) trials of settling wholesale financial transactions recorded on DLT platforms in central bank digital currency (CBDC), in which NatWest participated back in 2024.
At the end of the day, “money talks,” and if such projects can continue to back the economic case for blockchain adoption, big finance will be more willing to eat the cost of putting the infrastructure in place. The hope would then be that as more major institutions invest in the technology, they will, in turn, naturally be encouraged and incentivized to cooperate on interoperability.
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Closing thoughts
The summit’s closing keynote,David Palmer, COO of global Economy of Things (EoT) platform Pair Point (owned by Vodafone (NASDAQ: VOD) and Sumitomo Corporation (NASDAQ: SSUMF)), underscored the day’s key themes by suggesting that the road to transforming assets into tokens at scale is paved by regulatory clarity, interoperability and business case proof.
Putting the emphasis back onto TradFi, he concluded his speech by saying that banks and financial institutions “must be willing to upgrade their best product.”
It is likely that the listening representatives from the traditional powerhouses of banking and finance already shared this view by virtue of their being in attendance. Nevertheless, if greater blockchain adoption is to be achieved, it was an important message for the assembled business leaders, legal minds, regulators, innovators, and entrepreneurs to take away—if nothing more than to serve as motivation to continue and redouble their efforts.
In this regard, the summit’s organizers, the London Blockchain Conference ecosystem, aim to provide the platform for industry leaders to continue to shape “how blockchain, Web3, and AI are used to solve real-world problems and deliver results.”
Its next summit event will be held on July 7 in London and focuses on “Real World Asset Tokenization.”
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Source: https://coingeek.com/london-blockchain-finance-summit-tradfi-defi-talk-adoption-barriers/
