Sections 02–03

Global: regulation, rails and cross-border capital

Licensed product frameworks, central-bank-proven settlement layers, and hundreds of billions per quarter of cross-border institutional capital already moving — against screening regimes that review essentially every sovereign acquisition.

US$5,116.3b

Stock of cross-border investment, sampled markets

National statistics agencies, 31 December 2025

US$8.9b

Gulf sovereign FDI, Oct–Dec 2024 quarter

Second-largest source, up from US$0.1b

US$163b

Renewable energy project pipeline

Five-year estimate, sampled markets

US$200b

Regional private credit stock

About half in real estate

Regulation

Licensed digital asset frameworks

Across the major markets, digital asset legislation progressed from exposure draft in late 2025 to enactment through the first half of 2026. The common architecture creates two new licensed financial products — regulated digital asset platforms and tokenised custody platforms — both requiring an operating licence and subject to custody standards, settlement requirements, disclosure and dispute-resolution obligations, with the securities regulator as primary supervisor.

Transition periods run roughly 18 months (12 months to commencement plus 6 months to apply). Existing operators dealing in financial products must lodge a complete licence application within the transition window to retain no-action protection. Guidance is under review in most jurisdictions; the reforms confirm public permissionless networks are not themselves financial products, and class relief is emerging for intermediaries distributing licensed-issuer stablecoins.

AML / CTF

Baseline obligations

Exchange registration with AML/CTF authorities is the baseline; renewal every three years.
The Travel Rule is in force across FATF-aligned jurisdictions from 31 March 2026.
Cross-border transfers require international funds transfer reporting within 10 business days.
Threshold transaction reports apply to cash transactions over US$10,000.

Central bank pilots

Wholesale CBDC programmes, final reports 2026

Twenty use cases — 12 live pilots with real money and assets, 8 proofs-of-concept — ran from August 2025 to February 2026 across fixed income, managed funds, repos, structured products, private markets, carbon credits and trade payables. They achieved a world first: issuing a pilot wholesale CBDC onto both public and private distributed ledgers.

Settlement used central bank reserve balances, pilot wCBDC, tokenised bank deposits and regulated stablecoins across five platforms spanning public networks, permissioned enterprise chains and privacy-preserving Layer-2s. The next phase is a structured regulatory sandbox taking industry from experimentation to commercialisation.

Headline estimate

US$24b

Annual gain from full-scale tokenisation across the sampled markets — though researchers note only ~US$1 billion would be realised by 2030 on the current trajectory.

Existing players

Who is already on the field

Player	What they are	Why it matters
Listed crypto fund managers	Exchange-listed digital asset managers	Several wound up RWA funds in 2025 after failing to attract investment beyond their own seed commitment. Demand must precede launch.
Formally verified networks	Academically validated public chains with participant KYC	KYC/AML for all participants; first public chains to host a wholesale CBDC; multi-billion on-chain assets; consolidating registry providers.
Registry and unlisted-equity platforms	Private-company tokenisation and registry services	Registry services for unlisted securities worth over US$1 billion. Increasingly acquired by settlement networks.
Privacy-preserving Layer-2s	Institutional zero-knowledge settlement venues	Executed the first live repos using tokenised government bonds and live wholesale CBDC in central bank pilots.
Institutional liquidity providers	Trading, liquidity and custody desks	Fireblocks founding partners; Lloyd's-insured MPC custody; delivered the first bank-issued stablecoin transactions for corporate clients.
Digital asset managers	Regulated fund managers issuing tokenised funds	Partnered with registry and settlement networks on tokenised fund launches.
Global systemically important banks	Bank-issued stablecoins and deposit tokens	First live bank stablecoin payments from 2022; world-first intra-bank cross-border stablecoin transactions on public L1s. All central bank pilot participants.
Fractional property platforms	Retail fractional residential property (trust-based)	Units from ~US$50 — proof of retail appetite for fractionalisation, with limited liquidity.

Capital base

Pension capital and the investable asset stack

Pension capital

US$58 trillion, with headroom

Global pension and retirement assets exceed US$58 trillion, with the largest single-market pools projected to double by 2035. The largest funds each run hundreds of billions and target the trillion mark within a decade. Property is under 10% of most portfolios, and directly-held renewables exposure remains tiny — under US$1 billion across the 30 largest funds since 2020. That gap is the co-investment opportunity.

Asset base

What can be tokenised

Global real estate is valued in the hundreds of trillions, financed by tens of trillions of bank lending plus a fast-growing private credit market (projected to reach US$3 trillion by 2029). Commercial real estate transaction volume runs in the hundreds of billions annually. Infrastructure pipelines exceed US$1 trillion in every major region; power infrastructure alone is forecast to attract multi-trillion investment through 2050, with critical minerals adding a further multi-billion pipeline.

Screening

Foreign investment: the hard constraint

Substantial interest is typically 20%+ (subject to monetary threshold); direct interest is 10%+ for national-security businesses, land and media, at any value.
2026 thresholds vary by treaty status: non-treaty US$347m; treaty partners US$1.498bn; sensitive sectors and agribusiness US$73m; residential US$0; foreign government investors US$0.
New mandatory merger control regimes commenced across several markets on 1 January 2026.
Multiple jurisdictions now restrict foreign purchases of established dwellings for defined periods.
Key friction: sovereign wealth funds face a US$0 threshold, so essentially all SWF acquisitions are screened. Tokenising ownership does not remove this and can complicate beneficial-ownership tracing.

Source	Oct–Dec 2024 FDI
United States	$14.2 billion
Saudi Arabia	$8.9 billion (from $0.1b prior quarter)
Canada	$5.7 billion
Singapore	$4.0 billion
UAE	$1.8 billion

Finance and insurance overtook commercial real estate as the leading sector. Singapore and Canadian capital injected ~US$4.1 billion into prime office towers in 2025, attracted by AAA sovereign ratings and tax-efficient trust structures. GCC sovereign wealth funds manage ~US$5 trillion, projected to ~US$7.6 trillion by 2030.