Digital settlement is no longer experimental. Stablecoins have reached large-scale adoption, with transaction volumes exceeding trillions of dollars annually, reflecting global demand for programmable, always-on value transfer. At the same time, banks and market infrastructures are developing tokenized deposits, DLT settlement systems and multi-bank networks outside the open stablecoin economy.
Rather than converging on a single architecture, stablecoins, tokenized deposits, CBDC experiments and bank-led systems are evolving under different regulatory regimes and governance boundaries.
That is the starting point of The Principia of Sovereign Digital Interoperability (Black Paper): as global digital finance develops across multiple ledgers, issuers and regulatory domains, how will trust continue across systems that remain sovereign, regulated and institutionally different?
The market is moving, but not converging
The pattern is visible on both sides of digital settlement.
