Consensys and ClearToken have announced a plan to build 24/7 settlement infrastructure for tokenized securities in the United Kingdom. Under the proposal, tokenized security trades would settle against three money types: regular central bank money, tokenized commercial bank deposits, and stablecoins. ClearToken has cleared a key stage of the Bank of England's Digital Securities Sandbox, which is testing alternative settlement infrastructure for digital securities in live market conditions.
It is still a plan, not a live venue. But the architecture it describes is more complete than anything currently operating in the US — and it is being built in a regulatory environment that is actively facilitating rather than tentatively permitting it.
What ClearToken and Consensys Are Building
ClearToken is a UK clearing infrastructure company that has been developing settlement and clearing services specifically for tokenized securities. Its participation in the Bank of England's Digital Securities Sandbox — and its progression to a key stage of that program — gives it a regulatory standing that most tokenized infrastructure companies outside the UK do not have. The Bank of England's sandbox is not a regulatory exemption; it is a supervised live test environment where companies operate under real regulatory oversight while building and iterating on digital securities infrastructure.
Consensys brings the blockchain infrastructure layer. Known primarily as the company behind the MetaMask wallet and the Ethereum developer tooling ecosystem, Consensys has also built enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure — Quorum, Besu, and related stack components — used by financial institutions. The partnership positions Consensys's infrastructure as the settlement and smart contract layer underneath ClearToken's clearing and regulatory architecture.
The multi-currency settlement approach — regular money, tokenized deposits, and stablecoins — is meaningful because it mirrors the three-tier model that the UK's own regulated liability network has articulated. It is not a stablecoin-only settlement system, which would exclude the regulated banking infrastructure that institutional counterparties require.
The UK Is Building What the US Is Still Debating
The contrast with the United States is instructive. The US market has the largest AUM in tokenized assets globally, and institutions like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and DTCC are building at scale. But the settlement infrastructure they are building on operates under administrative exemptions — the SEC's TSV Innovation Exemption — rather than statutory authority. Post-Loper Bright, those exemptions are more legally vulnerable than they were two years ago.
The UK's Digital Securities Sandbox gives ClearToken and its participants a different foundation: supervised, Bank of England-endorsed, with a regulatory pathway to permanent authorization rather than a five-year exemption order. The Electronic Trade Documents Act (2023) gave English law digital trade documents the same legal standing as paper. The Bank of England's RTGS renewal programme is incorporating DLT compatibility. These are structural changes to legal and central bank infrastructure, not temporary exemptions.
The UK is not ahead of the US in market size. It is ahead in the regulatory architecture of what it is building — and the ClearToken/Consensys announcement is a signal that institutions are building to that architecture rather than waiting for the US to develop its own.
→ UK GBTD — what the seven-bank deposit pilot proved
→ Global RWA Hubs — UK as an infrastructure builder
→ US Tokenization Regulation — what the UK comparison reveals