Central banks will need to operate within tokenized systems to remain relevant.
Emerging economies are identified as the most exposed to the risks of this transition.
The International Monetary Fund published a technical note on April 1 in which it supports the tokenization of financial assets. The document, signed by Tobias Adrian, director of the Department of Monetary and Capital Markets, promotes a version of tokenization built on permissioned distributed ledgers (blockchains), governed by regulated institutions and anchored in central bank money. Public, open, permissionless networks—the infrastructure on which bitcoin, ethereum, and most cryptocurrencies operate—are not part of that vision.
The text distinguishes the tokenization that occurs within the regulated financial system and that that operates in open cryptocurrency networks. For the first of those models, the IMF lists benefits: real-time settlement, continuous liquidity management, and built-in regulatory compliance. For the second, silence is the answer: in 19 pages of technical analysis, the document does not mention Bitcoin or Ethereum.
However, it does mention that tokenized systems must incorporate intervention mechanisms that allow pausing or adjusting the execution of smart contracts under emergency conditions.. This override capability is structurally incompatible with network design. decentralized, where code immutability is a feature, not a defect.
The note describes three categories of tokenized money: tokenized commercial bank deposits, regulated stablecoins backed by safe assets, and wholesale central bank digital currencies.
When referring to stablecoins, the document points out that even those that are backed by high-quality assets depend on the operational capacity of their issuers to meet redemptions and the liquidity of the underlying public debt markets.
With that description, the IMF functionally equates them with money market funds, not central bank money. It is a distinction that has direct implications: in the architecture proposed by the organization, private stablecoins would not be definitive settlement assets, but rather instruments that require public support to function with systemic security.
The model that the IMF defends
The document proposes the “synthetic central bank digital currency” model as a preferred solution or CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency in Spanish), in which private issuers backed one hundred percent with central bank reserves offer regulated tokens. In this schemeinnovation occurs at the private application layerwhile the final settlement remains in the hands of the central bank.
To maintain this architecture, the IMF proposes five pillars:
- Safe money: base the system on money that is reliable.
- Equality of rules: apply the principle of “same activity, same risk, same rules” to crypto.
- Legal clarity: that there are no doubts about the legal status of digital assets.
- International connection: create standards so that systems from different countries work together.
- 24/7 emergencies: adapt crisis plans for automatic systems that operate around the clock.
What the document does not resolve
The IMF warns that developing economies are most exposed to the risks of tokenization: volatile capital flows accelerated by automation, substitution of local currency for dollar stablecoins, and erosion of monetary sovereignty.
The document also does not address the real trajectory of the market it claims to analyze. While the agency builds its regulatory roadmap, the total value of tokenized real-world assets or RWAs (real world assets) on public networks exceeded USD 17,000 billion, as reported by CriptoNoticias.
The document describes three future scenarios for the financial architecturebut none of them consider that institutional adoption is already occurring outside the perimeter that the organization considers desirable.
The note closes with a warning about urgency: the window to shape the architecture of the tokenized financial system is open, but it will not be indefinitely.
It is the same warning that the cryptocurrency ecosystem has been hearing from its institutional critics for more than a decade, with the difference that this time the organization is not asking to stop tokenization, but rather to direct it toward a specific destination: one in which central banks retain control of the definitive settlement and open networks remain outside the regulated financial system.