The successes and what explains them

A mountaineer preparing a climb studies the routes of those who went before. He reads the accounts of successful ascents, notes the passages where the route proved practicable, understands why a given party chose a given couloir at a given hour. He reads the accounts of accidents more attentively still. This fourth part follows the same method.

To speak of success, I have used four criteria. Real and lasting use, measurable by the number of investors or the volume processed. Significant size, from several hundred million to several billion dollars. Resilience in crises, in particular the winter of 2022 and the shocks of 2023. A solid regulatory framework, guaranteeing that the success does not rest on temporary tolerance. Few projects tick all these boxes. Those that do have a great deal to teach us.

Tokenised money market funds

The first success is collective. It concerns a category of products rather than a single player. In 2021 Franklin Templeton was first, with a registered US money market fund whose register was kept on the Stellar blockchain. In 2024 BlackRock launched BUIDL. Circle, Ondo, WisdomTree, JPMorgan, Spiko and others followed. At the end of October 2026, tokenised US Treasury funds alone weighed more than fourteen billion dollars, and four products individually exceeded 1.7 billion.