Statistics on tokenized financial instruments: A challenge for central banks

25 November 2025

Banca d'Italia today publishes 'Statistics on tokenized financial instruments: A challenge for central banks', the new issue of the series 'Markets, infrastructures, payment systems'.

The adoption of distributed ledger technology (DLT), based on blockchain, represents a significant evolution in the processes of creating, transferring and managing financial products and services.

Among the many applications of DLT, the tokenization of financial instruments (asset tokenization) is regarded by market participants as one of the areas with the highest growth potential. In order to support monetary policy decisions, micro- and macroprudential supervision, customer protection, and payment system oversight, it is therefore essential to have detailed and preferably harmonized statistics that enable adequate monitoring of these instruments.

However, due to limited global regulation and the lack of centralized trading and settlement systems, statistics on these instruments are still quantitatively and qualitatively inadequate.

Central banks, traditionally responsible for producing official financial statistics, thus face a challenging task, especially in light of the sector's rapid evolution. There is a concrete risk that official statistics may progressively lose track of relevant information about markets and intermediaries.

Drawing on the characteristics of the crypto-asset sector, this paper focuses specifically on digitalized financial instruments and aims primarily to analyse the relative information gap, outlining the guidelines for a potential data gaps initiative on the topic and providing some operational suggestions to help mitigate it.