30th November 2025 > > Tokenisation & the UK's budget.

tl;dr

Tokenisation on a grand scale comes ever closer. The budget has some good news (!) and potentially some better news (!!).

Market Snap

Market Wrap

After several weeks of trading at a discount, the price of BTC on Coinbase in the US is back to trading at a premium. There can be many reasons for any asset trading at a discount or premium to either its implied fair value or its actual fair value as priced on other markets. In this case, a discount is interpreted as US retail investors having a greater desire to sell than investors located elsewhere in the world, and a premium as US retail investors having a greater desire to buy than investors located elsewhere in the world. Why would that be? Coinbase is one of the very few centralised cryptocurrency exchanges available to US investors that allows for the deposit of fiat.

Of more import this week is the direction of travel in the spot ETF flows, and whether we have seen the end of the recent bout of selling, or whether we simply had a short pause during the last few trading days.

Curious Crypto’s Commentary - Tokenisation

Nasdaq’s head of digital assets strategy, Matt Savarese, has said that a top priority for the exchange is to gain SEC approval for offering tokenised stocks:

“We’ll just move as fast as we can. I think what we have to really evaluate where the public comments come back in and then answer and respond to the SEC questions as they come through. We hope to kind of work with them as quickly as possible.”

Under the new enlightened leadership of the SEC, I am quietly confident that Matt’s overtures and the Nasdaq’s formal proposal to the SEC will be welcomed with open arms.

In the not-too-distant future, all stocks will be tokenised and traded on-chain, as will all ETFs, and all bonds, government and corporate. Investors won’t even know they are using blockchain technology as their entry point will be the same as the centralised platforms they use today. Global mass adoption of cryptos looms ever larger on the horizon.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev agrees:

“Tokenisation will eventually eat the whole financial system.”

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – The budget

As part of the recent budget (https://www.curiouscryptos.com/post/28th-november-2025-the-budget-thailand) there was clarification that the Cryptoasset Reporting Framework (CARF) agreed with the OECD will be fully implemented from January 1^st 2026.

One of the key requirements is that centralised exchanges must collect additional data from their retail clients. If you have used Coinbase in the UK of late, you will be familiar with the demand to identify the recipient of any transfers of cryptos out of the exchange, and whether the receiving wallet is another exchange with the identity of that exchange, or a self-hosted wallet. You will now have to supply your National Insurance number or Unique Taxpayer Reference.

All of this is good stuff, probably the only positive element to the whole budget package. None of us have any intention of trying to avoid paying any relevant taxes, however egregious they may be. The whole concept of charging capital gains tax on investments made from income that has already been taxed is simply deranged, but it is what it is. Never forget that CGT is an extremely effective means of increasing the cost of capital for all business, lowering productivity, reducing growth, and making every single person in the country poorer than they would otherwise be.

…

Potentially, there is even better news.

We have this ridiculous rule that exchanging one crypto for another one, with no fiat intermediary, is subject to CGT. It is ridiculous on several levels. The first obvious complaint is that there is no immediate cash benefit to the investor, who may have to pay cash to HMRC. If CGT itself is an extremely effective means increasing the cost of capital for all business, charging CGT on non-cash retail transactions is mind-bogglingly stupid.

A second complaint is that the increased complexity of reporting potential gains and losses to HMRC for every crypto to crypto transaction guarantees that innocent mistakes will be made, and that an extra army of tax investors will need to be hired to go through each tax return. Admittedly from HMRC’s perspective the latter point is positive in its eyes. but it is yet another pointless drain on hard-earned taxpayers’ money.

Finally, it encourages a move away from centralised cryptocurrency exchanges into the DeFi world, in which enforcing tax requirements becomes a Herculean effort. Probably leading to another army of tax inspectors etc. etc.

However, and this is going to surprise you – HMRC has issued a consultation paper suggesting that it may move towards recognising DeFi transactions for capital gains or losses only when cryptos are exchanged back to fiat:

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/the-taxation-of-decentralised-finance-involving-the-lending-and-staking-of-cryptoassets/outcome/the-taxation-of-decentralised-finance-defi-involving-the-lending-and-staking-of-cryptoassets-summary-of-responses

I know, that is falling of one’s chair type of news. This might be the very first time in history that the grasping, greedy claws of HMRC are being moderated by a practical and reasonable take on the situation.

In the world in which HMRC makes this decision, it will encourage all crypto to crypto transactions to be moved to the decentralised world and away from the centralised exchanges. If that happens to a material extent – I do recognise there are barriers of entry to using DeFi though solutions are being worked to resolve those issues – HMRC will be forced to apply the same rules to all crypto gains and losses i.e. they only become a taxable event once exchanged back to fiat.

Oh, happy days ahead!