Vasileios Madouros: Finance in transition - the Central Bank of Ireland's approach to tokenised finance
Speech by Mr Vasileios Madouros, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, at the National Finance Conference, Dublin, 26 May 2026.
We are at the early stages of a potential technological rewiring of finance. Fast-forward ten or twenty years, and it seems likely that the use of shared, programmable ledgers – and the tokenisation of financial assets – will have become embedded across the financial system.
Today, we stand at a juncture. The question is less whether the technology will transform finance. Rather, it is how we collectively shape this ongoing transition, so that the potential of tokenised finance is realised, from the perspective of households, businesses and the broader economy.
Central banks are not just observers of this evolution, but active participants, providing many of the enabling foundations for the private sector to innovate responsibly. So today I want to outline how the Central Bank of Ireland is approaching the emergence of tokenised finance.
The transformative potential of tokenised finance
Let me start by recognising the transformative potential of the technology.
At its core, the modern financial system relies on a system of ledgers. Every bank deposit, every security, every loan is recorded on a ledger maintained by a financial intermediary. And most financial transactions ultimately rely on well-established – but also complex and costly – processes for updating and reconciling those ledgers across financial institutions.
Tokenisation – and the use of distributed ledger technology in finance – supports two core innovations. First, it enables a shift to shared ledgers that different parties can simultaneously agree on and update. Second, it enables programmability of transactions, with the shared ledgers not just containing a record of ownership, but also information that enables the execution of transactions based on pre-defined conditions.