Introduction from the ValueExchange

“Digital assets” have been a dominant industry theme in 2022. After several years of experimentation and development, this year has seen a surge in the volume of live, production use cases of DLT across the globe. From crypto assets to tokenised repos or swaps, newly operational asset classes have begun to evidence the significant value of DLT in the capital markets – delivering quick returns in liquidity, risk and costs.

In amongst the huge media visibility and industry discussion of digital assets, ISSA and the ValueExchange have been helping to highlight the practical, real life considerations of the DLT journey for the last three years.

In this, our third ‘longitudinal’ research survey, we are excited to be setting out a truly industry-wide perspective on how, where and why digital assets are materialising in our world today. Leveraging the extensive networks of both firms and those of our campaign sponsors (Accenture, Broadridge and VMWare), we are privileged to be sharing research that draws on statistical insights from 148 firms, including almost every leading financial market infrastructure, bank, broker, custodian and investor globally. Added to these insights are the views and reactions of over 35 organisations, who have kindly shared their own insights during interviews and industry working sessions.

In keeping with the growing maturity of DLT as a technology, we are also excited this year to be describing the market’s progress at a granular, asset class level. As the practicalities and benefits of each DLT usage case has emerged, we are now able to present these on a consolidated basis – so that you can see exactly where digital assets are delivering and why.

Most importantly, this report is just the tip of the iceberg. Thanks to your support, we have huge volumes of supporting data to draw on and so please make sure to reach out to us if ever you would like to dig further into these findings together as you prepare your next case for DLT transformation.