Fixing Fragmentation: Why BNP Paribas Wants a Few Chains, Not One

Quick Summary

Multiple chains, platforms and standards risk rebuilding the fragmentation post-trade has spent forty years trying to fix. Wayne Hughes, Digital Assets Market & Client Engagement Lead, Securities Services at BNP Paribas, says consolidation is critical if tokenisation is to scale, but argues the target is not one perfect chain. It is a reasonable, limited number of chains, platforms and standards.

Is tokenisation repeating post-trade's old mistakes?

Hughes agrees the risk is real. The industry could replicate the fragmentation of the past, or even make it worse, with each proposed solution simply becoming another standard. He expects this to be one of the key issues of the next few years. It is a pointed concern for post-trade, where decades of effort have gone into reconciling different messaging formats, market infrastructures and local practices. Tokenisation promised a cleaner model, and the proliferation of chains and platforms threatens to recreate the old problem in a new form.

Is today's fragmentation a failure?

Not in Hughes' view. He argues that the existing fragmentation is normal given how early the market still is, and that the industry is broadly heading in the right direction. Early markets tend to produce many competing approaches before the most useful ones win out. What matters is what happens next. BNP Paribas believes that consolidation and addressing fragmentation will be critical going forward if tokenisation is going to scale beyond individual initiatives into something the wider market can rely on.

Why not one chain, one platform, one standard?

This is where Hughes departs from the idea of a single end state. BNP Paribas does not believe the right target is a perfect world of one chain, one platform and one standard. His reasoning:

• A certain level of healthy competition is positive
• Different solutions may be a better fit for different use cases
• Different regions may be better served by different approaches
• Waiting for a perfect world to arrive may not be the ideal situation anyway

The aim, as he frames it, is to arrive at a reasonable, limited number of chains, platforms and standards: not replicating the past, but not stalling progress in pursuit of uniformity either.

FF NEWS TAKE:

Interoperability could well be the word of Sibos 2026, and Hughes gives the most practical version of the argument: aim for a few well-used rails, not one mythical rail. That is a harder position to hold than it sounds. Every new platform believes it is one of the few. The market will decide which survive, and the institutions that commit early to the right ones will shape what "limited" ends up meaning.