The UK's RWA activity centres on fund tokenization and the infrastructure to trade tokenized securities, backed by an unusually coordinated push from regulators and industry. The investment industry and FCA set out a blueprint for tokenized funds; the Digital Securities Sandbox opened a live testing ground; and interest in tokenized gilts and money-market products is growing. This is the UK landscape as of 2026 - directional, since it is moving quickly.

Fund tokenization leads

The UK's most concrete progress is in tokenized funds. A working group of the investment industry, supported by the FCA, published a blueprint for how UK-authorised funds can tokenize their units within existing rules.

That gave asset managers a clear, sanctioned path, which is why fund tokenization - rather than retail real estate - is the UK's leading edge. It plays to the strength of a large, established asset-management sector.

Infrastructure: the Digital Securities Sandbox

The Bank of England and FCA's Digital Securities Sandbox is the market-plumbing story. It lets firms run DLT-based issuance, trading, and settlement of tokenized securities under modified rules, testing how on-chain markets work in practice.

Its significance is secondary trading and settlement - the hard part most markets lack. Uptake here is a leading indicator of how fast UK tokenized securities can scale.

What's being tokenized

Beyond funds, interest is building in tokenized gilts and money-market instruments, mirroring the global pull toward short-term government debt as the first liquid RWA. Tokenized real estate exists but is a smaller, more fragmented segment.

The pattern echoes the EU: institutions and funds lead, retail property follows. The UK's edge is the regulatory coordination behind it.

Named cases worth knowing

The UK's progress has concrete names behind it. The fund-tokenization blueprint came from the Investment Association's Technology Working Group and was published in November 2023, then extended in later stages - it is the sanctioned route UK-authorised funds follow, not a think-piece. abrdn tokenized a money-market fund, and firms like Legal & General and Schroders have run tokenization work, which is why funds lead here.

On infrastructure, the Digital Securities Sandbox went live in September 2024 and is designed to run for around five years, letting firms operate DLT issuance and settlement under modified rules. Separately, Fnality - a bank-owned venture - launched a sterling wholesale settlement system using central-bank money, tackling the cash leg that most tokenization projects leave unsolved.

The headline public-sector move is DIGIT, the pilot digital gilt. The Chancellor announced it at Mansion House in November 2024, HM Treasury and the Debt Management Office launched procurement in March 2025, and the government appointed HSBC as platform provider in early 2026. The Debt Management Office has described DIGIT as an experimental issue sitting outside its normal gilt programme, underscoring that this is a deliberate test rather than a funding exercise. A sovereign issuing debt on-chain, even experimentally, is the clearest signal of intent a market can send. For an issuer, the lesson is that the UK's edge is coordination - regulator, Treasury, and industry moving together - more than any single live deal.

Reading the numbers

Treat figures here as directional and dated. The live breakdown of tokenized assets by class and chain - including UK and global issuers - is tracked in the global market data, drawing on TVL and issuance data.

For the UK specifically, watch fund tokenization uptake and Digital Securities Sandbox activity as the clearest signals of momentum.

Where to go next

• Next: RWA regulation in Singapore.
• Live data: the global market data.
• Glossary: tokenized fund.

Sources: UK FCA (fca.org.uk); Investment Association; Bank of England (bankofengland.co.uk); rwa.xyz, as of 2026.