Yesterday I had the great pleasure of speaking to the Securities Services team at BNP Paribas in Madrid. Many thanks to David Calabaza for the invitation. We covered a bit of everything regarding the tokenization of financial markets, from how it impacts money markets to how it connects with capital markets, and I wanted to share a few thoughts here. Someone asked how I would define tokenization for a person who has no idea what a blockchain is. I didn't have a rehearsed pitch ready, so my mind went to Marc Levinson's book, The Box, and how shipping containers transformed global trade. Before containers, everything was shipped loose as breakbulk cargo, in boxes, sacks, and barrels, and every load had to be handled differently: loading a ship took days, fixed infrastructure costs were sky-high, and shrinkage and theft were constant, even if the system seemed efficient at the time. Once the container was standardized, you could suddenly move goods from truck to ship to train without ever touching what was inside. That is essentially what tokenization does for assets: instead of every FMI, bond, equity, or form of money operating in its own operational and intermediation silo, you put it inside a standard digital "container." Now, the usual pushback is completely logical: "Sure, but a tokenized financial asset still carries all its underlying legal complexity, remains subject to local regulations, and the underlying asset is still what actually matters." I completely agree. But this reminds me of the corner fittings on shipping containers: standardization didn't eliminate customs at every port or make the cargo inside stop mattering. Previously, every shipping line had its own rigging system, meaning a crane at one port couldn't lift another company's box. Once corner fittings were standardized and the patents were released, any crane could handle any container. At the time, everyone said it was impossible, that it required too much investment, that it would clash with regulations, and that there would never be consensus. We cannot evaluate a structural shift by assuming current variables are static, or we will fall into severe myopia. Systems naturally reorganize themselves; initial friction shapes the path, but as soon as incentives shift, the regulator ultimately adapts to the new environment. We also spoke at length about tokenized money. I shared the same view I always stand by: all formats will coexist, and each will serve its own purpose. From tokenized central bank reserves acting as the anchor of the system (wCBDC), to tokenized deposits (TD) preserving the banking relationship and credit creation, all the way to stablecoins opening up corridors with greater agility, including natively on-chain settlement systems like Tempo or Ethereum to tap into their native global programmability and composability. Today they are viewed as competitors because, let's be honest, they are, especially when one has a multi-year operational head start over the other. The problem is that many banks are jumping into stablecoin and tokenized deposit initiatives without a clear understanding of the "why." It is the equivalent of buying AI licenses for a company without changing its culture or its processes. With tokenized deposits in particular, you need a deep modernization of the core banking stack to operate in real time; in fact, once you reach that point, you realize that the token itself is the most irrelevant part of the entire internal transformation you had to execute. If you allow me to lean into a crypto analogy and oversimplify what I have in my head, the real magic of all this lies in a multinational treasurer's ability to move capital without friction: the corporate treasury starts functioning like a vault, the CFO acts as its curator, and the flow across Tokenized Deposits <> Stablecoins <> MMFs moves atomically without cut-offs, without liquidity trapped in precautionary buffers, and without today's heavy operational overhead. Finally, we touched on my favorite topic: liquidity and the false myth that T+0 is free. Today's financial system runs on a constant recycling of liquidity (netting), and that is possible precisely because settlement is not instantaneous and because we have indirect legal ownership that facilitates the fungibility of instruments. To me, the efficiency of the system lives in a trilemma across three variables: settlement speed, the collateral required to cover counterparty risk (margins at the intermediary), and the liquidity needed to fund that settlement. If you accelerate settlement toward real time, you reduce counterparty risk and margin at the intermediary, but you drastically increase the need for pre-funding and gross liquidity. If you slow down the settlement cycle, you save a massive amount of liquidity thanks to netting, but you increase counterparty risk exposure throughout the cycle. The market lives in that constant balancing act. If the destination is T+0, market structure will reorganize itself to solve for that liquidity cost, just as central banks continue evolving their facilities to maintain the stability of the system. Once again, thank you to the BNP Paribas team for the debate and the opportunity.