The UK government on Monday published a roadmap to move tokenization of its wholesale financial markets from pilots to live trading over the next year, enlisting a 54-firm taskforce that includes BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Ripple and targeting the country’s first tokenized government bond by early 2027.

The inaugural report from Chris Woolard, HM Treasury’s Wholesale Digital Markets Champion, projects that tokenization could add up to £33 billion ($44 billion) to annual economic output and £14 billion in yearly tax revenue by 2035. The taskforce will stand up nine action groups over 12 months, focused first on tokenized repo, with a live end-to-end trial targeted for spring 2027.

“Like all network games, it is a race and one where the U.K. needs to move at the speed of the most agile players if we want to ensure we have a stake in developing the approach for international markets,” Woolard wrote.

The digital gilt itself is not a new idea. Britain announced its Digital Gilt Instrument, or DIGIT, in November 2024 and appointed HSBC’s Orion platform to the pilot in February. What the report adds is a timetable and a wider ambition: it seeks follow-on gilt issuance, live secondary-market trading, and eligibility for the bonds to be used as collateral, urging the Bank of England to accept them.

The roadmap also warms to public blockchains. Woolard’s team proposed a hybrid design layering permissioned institutional networks on top of permissionless ones, citing BlackRock’s tokenized money-market fund BUIDL on Ethereum as a model, while flagging that a chain reorganization could in theory reverse a settled transaction, a finality risk traditional systems do not carry.

The report frames the effort as a contest the UK loses if standards and liquidity settle offshore first. Woolard’s team has asked for industry feedback by Sept. 4.

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