Paris Blockchain Week: France bets on the infrastructure of digital finance
- 7 days ago
- 6 min read
For years, the digital-asset industry cast itself as a rebellion against the institutions of finance.
At Paris Blockchain Week, it looked increasingly like an argument for rebuilding them.
That was the more revealing story in Paris. Beneath the familiar language of innovation, interoperability and scale, a different reality came into view: digital assets are being absorbed into the machinery they once claimed they would displace. Ministers spoke of prosecutions and state credibility. Bankers debated permissioned infrastructure. Payments executives described stablecoins as settlement rails. Regulators spoke not of completing a framework, but of beginning one. Even the more ambitious claims about tokenisation now sound less like manifestos than institutional design. France, for its part, appears determined to place itself near the centre of that redesign.
The first signal came from the state. Jean-Didier Berger, Minister Delegate to the Minister of the Interior, addressed the French response to the attacks on digital-asset holders in May 2025 and said that the National Organised Crime Prosecution Office has already taken on 230 sector-related cases since January. He coupled that enforcement message with a broader case for France as a stable and predictable destination for the industry, and as Europe’s most attractive investment destination for six consecutive years. The point was not merely that the state is watching. It was that the state intends to provide order.
The second signal was diplomatic. Clara Chappaz, now serving as Ambassador for Digital Affairs and AI, declared that France would place digital assets and artificial intelligence on the agenda of its 2026 G7 presidency. She also referred to active coordination with South Korea, Japan and the United States on alternatives to a stablecoin market she described as roughly 85% dollar-dominated. That suggests Paris wants the conversation to move beyond national regulation and towards international standard-setting. France is not merely trying to accommodate the next phase of digital finance. It wants a hand in shaping it.
A third lesson concerned the infrastructure already being built around bitcoin and tokenised assets. Adam Back of Blockstream said that Liquid now carries €5bn in issued assets, including tokenised shares of MicroStrategy, MetaPlanet, Capital B and H100, as well as stablecoins and corporate bonds. He also pointed to Blockstream Research’s 324-byte post-quantum signature scheme, already live on Liquid, with a bitcoin opcode proposal in view. Such details may sound esoteric. But they reflect an important shift: the conversation in digital assets is becoming less about ideological purity and more about resilience, market plumbing and long-term technical durability.
The same could be said of payments. Christian Rau of Mastercard confirmed the company’s March acquisition of BVNK and set out a target of full tokenisation of European ecommerce by 2030. Mastercard already settles part of its European card flows in stablecoins with Circle and has launched card programmes with firms such as MetaMask, Bitget, MoonPay and Kraken. This is no longer experimentation at the margins. Large payment networks increasingly appear to regard tokenisation and stablecoins as part of mainstream commercial infrastructure.
Entrepreneurship formed the fifth pillar of the week’s message. Start In Block 2026, the event’s start-up competition, drew more than 1,000 applications. Manako took first place, followed by The Risk Protocol and Sundial Protocol. Such contests do not prove maturity on their own. But they do suggest that, alongside governments, banks and incumbents, a fresh generation of firms is already positioning itself around the next phase of the stack.
Yet the more revealing discussions were perhaps the least promotional. One of the clearest themes to emerge was that tokenisation does not, by itself, solve the problem of liquidity. Darko Hajdukovic of the London Stock Exchange Group put it plainly: distributed-ledger technology is just another technology layer; it cannot create liquidity where no natural market interest exists. Sabi Bazard of Deutsche Bank made a similar point, arguing that the industry should be more candid about the fact that putting an asset on a blockchain, or slicing it into smaller units, does not automatically make it trade more easily.
That candour is overdue. Tokenisation has often been marketed as a universal solvent for financial friction. In reality, liquidity still depends on demand, distribution, secondary markets, trusted intermediaries and credible infrastructure. The token may alter the wrapper. It does not abolish the economics.
That leads to the deeper argument about architecture. What sort of blockchain infrastructure is fit for institutional finance? Here the industry remains divided. Declan, heading Linea at ConsenSys, described private permissioned layer-one blockchains as an “anti-pattern”, arguing instead for public ecosystems connected through zero-knowledge technology and permissioned features. Kara Kennedy of JP Morgan took the opposite view, arguing that private permissioned infrastructure remains, for now, the only safe way to process multi-trillion-dollar institutional volumes. Her examples included 24/7 deposit accounts and tokenised collateral systems operating inside tightly controlled environments.
The likelier outcome is not the triumph of one model over another, but a gradual convergence. Markus Infanger of Ripple suggested as much when he observed that the market is shifting away from DLT “walled gardens” and towards public blockchains with permissioned elements. Finance, in other words, may end up with a hybrid model: more interoperability than banks once wanted, but more control than crypto purists once imagined.
Regulation, too, is beginning to look less like a finish line and more like an evolving framework. Peter Kerstens of the European Commission offered one of the week’s more useful formulations: MiCA is not the end of the story, but the beginning. That is probably right. Europe has established an important baseline. But as tokenised assets, on-chain collateral and digital settlement tools become more entangled with conventional finance, those rules will need to evolve with the market they are trying to govern.
Stablecoins sit at the centre of that next phase. Several speakers treated them as foundational market infrastructure. Eric Anziani of Crypto.com pointed to tokenised money-market funds already being used by institutional traders as collateral, allowing them to post margin and earn yield simultaneously. Giovanni Conti of Gate.io was blunter: without stablecoins, he suggested, modern centralised crypto exchanges would struggle to function at all. The conceptual shift is significant. Stablecoins are increasingly viewed not as products, but as rails.
Even there, however, the question returns to liquidity. Jan-Oliver Sell of Qivalis argued that a bank-led consortium model may be the necessary route to achieving deep liquidity for euro-denominated on-chain settlement. Mark Daly of Zero Hash added that redundancy and secondary-market connectivity matter more than any single issuance model. If digital finance is to scale, it will need not only tokenised assets, but multiple pathways for access, settlement and market-making.
A final theme, somewhat adjacent yet potentially profound, was digital identity. Speakers differed sharply on how adoption would occur. Frederik Gregaard of the Cardano Foundation argued that digital identity could unlock substantial economic value and would therefore attract policymakers’ attention. Maurice Shulman of Partouche suggested that real scale would come only when regulators impose legal obligations. Others, such as Michael Toutonghi of Verus, argued for open, privacy-preserving, “people-powered” infrastructure rather than systems dominated by either corporations or states. However it develops, digital identity appears increasingly likely to become part of the broader financial architecture: relevant not only to access and data portability, but also to compliance, onboarding and trust.
What Paris Blockchain Week ultimately revealed was not an industry escaping institutions, but one learning to need them. The romance of disintermediation is giving way to the realities of market structure: regulation, settlement, identity, liquidity and political backing. In that sense, the sector is becoming less insurgent and more administrative.
France seems to understand that shift. It is not trying simply to host the conversation; it is trying to shape the terms of it. Across enforcement, diplomacy, payments and tokenisation, the country is positioning itself not at the edge of the new financial order, but nearer its strategic centre. Whether that ambition succeeds will depend less on rhetoric than on execution. But the intent is now unmistakable.
That may be the clearest conclusion to draw from Paris: the next phase of digital assets will belong not to those who speak most loudly about disruption, but to those who can build systems that institutions, regulators and markets are prepared to use.
Or, as Anne Le Hénanff put it at Paris Blockchain Week,
“We are not just witnessing the future of finance, we are shaping it.”
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