Digital assets are one of the key themes at Sibos 2025, and day one featured several sessions covering the intricacies of stablecoins, CBDCs, and the world of crypto.
Interoperating digital currencies: Solving for the diversity of money
Moderated by Swift’s Nick Kerigan, the session on interoperating digital currencies featured Rob Allen, Australian Payments Plus; Charifa El Otmani, Swift; Alexandra Hachmeister, Deutsche Bundesbank; Dean Hardy, Citi; and Tony Mclaughlin, Ubyx Inc.
Kerigan outlined that, as the Genius Act accelerates stablecoin adoption in the US, and other jurisdictions are developing digital forms of wholesale central bank money and blockchain based, tokenised deposit solutions, the need to integrate digital money with existing formats is critical.
Mclaughlin kicked off the session by likening stablecoins to traveller’s cheques in disguise. “US dollar-denominated, non-bank issuer, pre-funded, fully collateralised, and they don't pay interest. The only difference between a stablecoin and a traveller’s cheque is that the traveller’s cheque is made of paper and a stablecoin is code, and that's no difference whatsoever. We shouldn't be blinded by the technology. A stablecoin is a negotiable instrument. We've had negotiable instruments for hundreds of years, and we know how to process negotiable instruments in banks. It's an old instrument in new clothes, and can be incorporated into the regular, regulated financial system.”
Allen added that he believes the future of digital money is going to be tokenised, but will exist on public chains, since the liquidity that will flow across borders will not necessarily be denominated in US dollar. “What we've been doing for a couple of years is looking at what a future payment scheme might look like in a world where we don't own the infrastructure,” he commented. “The infrastructure is public chains, and the new payments primitives are forms of digital money — whether it be stable coins or deposit tokens or more exotic things like tokenised money market funds that are yield variables, but they all have $1 denomination. So how do you maintain the singleness of money? How do you maintain the fungibility of those tokens when they're issued by different organisations with different credit ratings?”
El Otmani described the resulting challenges as ‘the perfect fragmentation storm’ at both market and technology level. On one hand, markets are moving at different speeds and are making different strategic decision. On the other hand, “traditional assets and money settle on interconnected wealth. That provides a settlement protection framework, and it provides clarity in terms of the finality rules. But as money is transforming, is reinvented; as assets are being tokenised, and as new platforms are coming into the landscape — all this is creating asynchronous flows. It's creating new operational and settlement risks, and we need to address those risks together for the landscape to continue to function.”
An audience poll revealed that 66% of participants expect a mix of digital money types to co-exist in the future, while 20% believe stablecoins will dominate. The important takeaway, Mclaughlin noted, is that “every institution in the room needs to offer wallets”, so that tokens do not live on self-custody wallets and thus become invisible to tax authorities.
Hachmeister explained how the Eurosystems’ two track approach through short-term (‘Pontes’) and long-term (‘Appia’) strategies for DLT settlement are developing. “We truly believe that in the short term — end of next year — we want to deliver something to the market where settlement is foreseen in a productive environment, and we're not in a sandbox. We will start with a pilot solution based on what we have done through the exploratory phase, using the building blocks of the three different systems that we had. That is basically Pontus; making sure that as the market evolves, that they will get the digital settlement asset that they need through connecting.”
She added: “This is why it's called Bridge, because we are connecting the digital asset to the target services. We will not have a digital coin yet. That's not the point of it. We're just making sure that you get the settlement.”
On top of market and technical challenges, Hardy emphasised the practical challenges of integrating digital currencies. “How do we look at it even internally? How am I going to book an FX contract where part of it is digital? How am I going to put that on the ledger or the balance sheet, and reconcile it when everything is the traditional infrastructure we've been using for decades?” he questioned.
Hardy continued that, together with El Otmani’s team, they’ve been looking at FX solutions and trying to learn from their centralised approach, and figuring out how this could potentially work for integrating digital assets.
“There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and banks loving FX,” quipped Mclaughlin, highlighting how catching foreign stablecoin in a wallet and converting it to local currency, a potential model for incorporating stablecoins into the financial system.
Ending the panel with a quick fire round, asking by which future Sibos we’ll see scaled adoption of digital money, most panellists agreed: 2026.
How will digital assets reshape the future of global finance?
Another session focusing on the impact of digital assets was moderated by Bloomberg’s Anna Irrera, and featured Charles Cascarilla, Paxos; Thierry Chilosi, Swift; Joseph Lubin, ConsenSys; Holger Neuhaus, ECB; and Ather Williams III, Wells Fargo.
The panel re-emphasised the acceleration in adoption of digital assets. Highlighting Swift’s announcement of earlier in the day, Chilosi explained what led to add a blockchain-based ledger to their infrastructure (as announced earlier in the day). He explained that, as the industry moves from experimentation to clarity of rules, it brings more confidence to institutional players to get involved.
Speaking specifically on boom in stablecoins, Cascarilla explained how they originated as a way to facilitate the crypto ecosystem, where assets and cash were moving 24/7 but some people in the crypto world would not have access to bank accounts that had dollar availability. So you could think of stablecoins as a better rail, which is fast, cheap, programmable and transparent. However, it’s also an account that a user can hold without needing a bank account.
“And so now the combination of having a better rail and having an account structure allows you to build different business models than you could before,” Cascarilla continued. “That is really transformative, because the dollar rail system is not that efficient. The actual movement of dollars is much slower than most other currencies, where the RTP is very well developed, and so you have this unmet need of people wanting dollars. You have an unmet need of you really need to be able to have a programmable, immediate federal rail system, and that's where stable coins have stepped in. It’s not just about crypto anymore. It's about how you can build different business models with a combination of programmable money in an account structure.”
Neuhaus emphasised that you can only create a thriving digital asset ecosystem through private and public sector collaboration, and that it was market demand that had led the ECB to create their two-track approach to offering DLT settlement.
Williams III confirmed this sentiment. “Think about the major economies around the world. If you look at the US, the EU, UK, China, India — for all of those countries, the payment system is a part of national security. And so completely giving up that payment system to the private sector is not something I foresee.”
While concerns about fragmentation exist, Cascarilla urged to see the other side of the coin. “I think the whole point is fragmentation,” he commented. “Jim Barksdale, one of the founders of Netscape, said the whole history of innovation is bundling and unbundling. And we’re in an unbundling phase. Decentralisation is exactly what needs to happen in order to move on from the problems of the financial crisis, and the solutions that are put into place, that have in many ways stultified the innovation that needs to happen.”
Sibos regulars will have heard about blockchain and digital assets for years, so what are the current experiments that are happening when it comes to tokenisation? Lubin explained: “Stocks are coming, they are being tokenised in different forms. There are digital asset Treasury companies that represent the onboarding of certain elements of traditional finance to DeFi. There are fit-for-purpose layer two technologies that corporations can start to make use of. All of these are in today's tool kit. The next things out there are effective use of decentralised identity, decentralised attestation system, decentralised reputation systems.”
Finally, when asked about what the industry will have achieved a year from now, the panel concluded that we will have tokenised deposits moving between financial institutions.