Token 2049 Interview: Tokenisation & the Future of Money with Daniel Lee

How are tokenised assets, stablecoins and Web3 payment rails reshaping global finance? In our latest interview, Echo Zhao, Country Head of Moomoo Singapore, sits down with Daniel, Head of Web3 at Banking Circle, to unpack one of the industry’s most important shifts: the move toward tokenised money and real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation.

Banking Circle, a European bank supporting more than 500 payment institutions, recently became the first bank in Europe to issue a MiCA-compliant e-money token. Daniel explains why tokenised funds, tokenised deposits and on-chain settlement matter, and how they enable the next phase of capital-market innovation.

He breaks down what many often overlook — that tokenised equities, security tokens, stock tokens and tokenised deposits are not the same, and each carries different rights, risks and use cases. As the lines between TradFi and Web3 blur, Daniel believes tokenised assets will complement traditional markets first, before scaling toward broader adoption.

From atomic settlement to new forms of collateral in decentralised finance, this conversation offers a clear, regulated perspective on what’s ahead for digital-asset infrastructure.

Watch the full video to explore how tokenisation may shape the next era of global finance.Tokenisation & the Future of Money — A Conversation with Banking Circle

🎙️Verbatim Transcript

Thank you so much for joining us in this session. It's such an honor to have you with us.

Thank you for the invitation.

Just to start off, maybe you can introduce a little bit about Banking Circle, what you guys do and what's your role at Banking Circle?

Banking Circle is a bank based in Europe. We focus on payments. We support about 500 payment institutions, and also we act as correspondent banks for several banks as well. And we are also a bank in Australia. In Europe, we are the first bank that actually launched a MiCA-compliant stablecoin. That is what we think is the future of payments, where tokenised money would play an important part.

What about yourself? I mean, what's your role at Banking Circle?

So I'm head of web 3, and I look after the web 3 initiative. So that includes the stablecoins that I mentioned, and we also do other things, for example, tokenised deposit. So we also launched a Euro tokenised deposit for Ant Group.

Interesting. Now, you just mentioned both stablecoin and tokenised deposit. So for me, it's like Banking Circle is providing the rails, and the investors or allocators are just ready to hop on the train, all of a sudden, whether it's stablecoins or tokenised deposits, just popping up as alternative options. Why are these relevant to today's investors?

Well, I think if you think of what's going to happen in the future, a lot of people think that you're going to see tokenisation of real world assets happening a lot more, you know, as it is now, you already see things like tokenised equities. You know, Kraken has launched tokenised equities, and a lot of other firms are looking at that as well. So you will see more and more capital market products being put in the tokenised form. So the difference between a tokenised asset versus a traditional asset is a lot of tokenised assets are actually transacted without an intermediary. So you take, for example, when you go and buy an equity, you do not really worry about the seller not delivering the shares, or the buyer not paying you, right? But what happens is, the reason you can have that trust is you have a centralised party. You have brokers in between, and you also have a clearing house. But what happens in a tokenised asset? A lot of transactions happen in a blockchain where it's disintermediated, and in order to make sure that the transaction is settled without any issue, where the buyer gets the goods and the seller actually gets paid, you need the transaction to happen delivery versus payment, which is known as atomic settlement. In order to get a tokenised asset to be done in such a format, you need tokenised money to pay for it. Otherwise, what will happen then is that you will have a mismatch between the timing of the payments and the delivery of the tokenised asset.

Thank you for elaborating on that. You mentioned some of the providers or industry players already getting into the space. Do you see these, whether tokenised deposits or stable coins or other crypto related assets, going to replace the traditional assets, or is it complementary to what we already have in the traditional financial world?

I think at the moment, if you look at the overall crypto asset space, or tokenised space, we are just in a few trillions of US dollar worth versus if you look at the whole market cap of gold, that's more than USD 20 trillion. You look at equities, that's like USD 120 trillion. And fixed income is also another about USD 120 trillion or thereabouts. So tokenised assets is still very relatively small, relative to a lot of these traditional assets. So you're going to see it's going to be quite a long process. It's going to be incremental, but more and more, you will see that assets will be tokenised. And eventually you could see that maybe tokenised asset might become the majority means of transaction in the future, but it will probably take some time to achieve that.

So right now, at least for the time being, foreseeable future, it's complementary to the traditional assets. If this complementarity holds, do you actually see, at the moment, the corporates and institutions are increasing their volume in terms of the allocation?

If we're looking forward, where will we be in the next 2 to 3 years?

Well, I think that you will see a growth in tokenised asset, in tokenised real world asset, but it's going to take some time.

I mean, the things that are hindering it would probably be... one is you need clear regulation on what happens when you tokenise an asset, how you distribute it, and stuff like that. There's some clarity that needs to be done.

And then the other thing that also needs to be done is that there's a lot of education that needs to be brought forth, because generally, there are a lot of people that have misconception of what these assets are. So like, recently, I did a panel on this tokenised assets, and I just realised that in the general audience there's a lot of misunderstanding about the different types of categories.

You mentioned just now that Banking Circle is the first one that issued a MiCA-compliant stablecoin in Europe. Tell us about this stablecoin, and how does that shape the stablecoin issuer landscape in Europe?

We are the first bank that issued. There were other EMIs that did the issuance, right? We are the first bank that did issuance. MiCA gives a very clear regulation of what a stablecoin should be.

So under MiCA, you have different types of stablecoins, for example, what is known as an asset-referenced token, or what's known as an e-money token. So what we have issued is actually an e-money token, which is a token that's backed one-for-one by a single currency, which in our case is euro. And this token is actually set up similar to how e-money should be. It is fully backed by fiat currency. You are only allowed to actually invest in only assets that are allowed in the EMD.

But in fact, we go one step further. Our reserve that we use to actually hold this is actually all done in a bankruptcy remote structure. So, in this case, you are actually giving an additional layer of protection, right? So regardless of whatever happens, the reserve remains safe, and we do not lend out these reserves. And the reserves are all actually strapped into the central bank.

So by doing this, we ensure the highest possible integrity in keeping the reserves.

Token 2049 is coming to town right next week. Super busy, packed with different panel discussions, moderations. What are you looking forward to in this event? What do you expect?

Well, I think all these events are actually very good to understand about what are the future trends? What is the global community looking at? Where is the next trend going? So, what are the new products in the market? So I'm excited to see what's in store this year.

These days, it's hard to say whether you're web 3 or TradFi, it's all going both ways, the lines are blurring. So yeah, there's a lot of exciting things I'm looking forward to.

I think that there's also a big convergence now you're seeing between TradFi and crypto, right? So you see a lot of traditional brokers like yourself moving into the crypto space, and there are a lot of crypto space people that are moving vice versa. You will see a lot of crypto providers that are also doing certain structured products and derivative products, and that is actually very similar to the wealth management products from TradFi.

Yeah, it's very interesting to see how the industry continues to evolve. And as a regulated financial service provider, definitely, we should work together to make the ecosystem more lively, and to provide better education to our community members. Thank you very much, Daniel, for this lively discussion and dialog. Thank you so much for sharing all the insights in web 3 space with us.

Thank you very much.