What banks need to tokenize and settle: MERGE panels on custody, compliance standards and Spain's rules

The last panel of the MERGE Madrid 2026 Institutional Summit on Oct 27 was about plumbing: the infrastructure banks need to tokenize, settle and move money onchain 4↗2. MERGE is a conference where banks, regulators and crypto firms meet, and the summit at the Bolsa de Madrid brought in speakers from Banco Santander, BBVA, Deutsche Börse, Anchorage Digital, BitGo and others 4. The recordings of those panels aren't in StreamETH's archive yet ↗4. Earlier MERGE stages in São Paulo and Madrid are, and their transcripts show where people who build that plumbing say the hard parts are.

At MERGE São Paulo in 2026, a custody panel opened with the CEO of Prosegur Crypto, part of a cash-in-transit group, saying the firm first treated custody as a technology problem about private keys and found out it was wrong 2. In his account, keeping a key safe is something many people can do, but carrying a billion dollars of client risk is not, which is why he argued custody should sit at the centre of any crypto business 2. The Madrid 2026 speaker list named José Ángel Fernandez Freire as Prosegur Crypto's CEO ↗1.

The same speaker said that under MiCA a custodian can do nothing with a client's assets except give them back, so custody becomes a paid job of its own 2. He expected the largest Spanish banks, naming BBVA and Santander, to build crypto services themselves, and said smaller banks would do better testing demand through a regulated partner's APIs before hiring a full blockchain team 2.

Ledger Enterprise took the other side. Its speaker said Ledger's infrastructure secures, in a non-custodial way, about 28% of all stablecoins and about 20% of all digital assets 2. He said many US banks outsource custody to sub-custodians, which in his view gives away revenue and moves control out of the bank, and he urged banks to run it in-house 2. He described Ledger's onboarding as a key ceremony that sets up administrators, who write the signing rules, and operators, who sign transactions 2.

A speaker from Dynamo, a Brazilian security firm that said it runs the central bank infrastructure behind Pix with more than 300 million operations a day, tied custody back to traditional finance 2. He said last year's Pix incidents in Brazil were key management failures, and that a stolen key in crypto is worse because a transaction can't be revoked 2. He said Dynamo follows NIST standards and treats MPC wallets as promising but not yet standardized 2.

A São Paulo infrastructure panel with Chainlink, Edge & Node, the company behind The Graph, and OpenZeppelin got specific about tokenized securities 1. The OpenZeppelin speaker said DTCC, one of its customers, processes about $87 trillion in securities a year and is moving its tokenization work onchain 1. He said the main problem is that tokenization platforms each write their own compliance and permission rules, which forces one-off integration work every time a DeFi protocol wants to accept a tokenized fund, and he pointed to ERC-3643 as an attempt at a common standard 1.

The Chainlink speaker described a delivery versus payment case that started in Brazil's Drex pilot, a cross-border settlement between a Brazilian interbank institution and a bank abroad, where business rules confirm delivery before payment moves 1. The Edge & Node speaker said the demand they see is for reporting that regulators can read, and that rules on data sovereignty, the travel rule and data privacy are pushing institutions to run blockchain data tools in their own controlled environments 1. He named privacy between institutions as the next big requirement 1.

At MERGE Madrid 2025, a Spanish-language panel on real-world asset tokenization laid out how this works under Spanish law 3. The lawyer on the panel, from a digital law firm, said Spain lets financial instruments be represented on DLT, and that each issue must go through a registered entity approved by the CNMV, known as an ERIR, which records the tokens and can block or freeze them 3. He said small issues, below about 8 million or aimed at fewer than 150 investors, can skip a full prospectus, and that bonds and equity were the first instruments allowed 3.

The panel agreed that tokenizing an asset doesn't make it liquid 3. The fintech chief on the panel said someone still has to want to buy the asset, and the speaker from Bricken, a tokenization-as-a-service firm, said tokens split across different chains, custodians and standards leave markets too thin, and said Bricken backs a new interoperability standard numbered 7943 3. The lawyer said no regulated secondary market was running yet and predicted one at STX could be live by November 2026 3. Because that transcript is machine translated from Spanish, these points are paraphrased 3.

MERGE's own summary of the 2026 summit said its final session covered how crypto assets are changing banking and the infrastructure institutions need to tokenize, settle and move money onchain ↗2. The day after, MERGE described the summit table as banks, market infrastructures and digital asset firms discussing tokenization, stablecoins and settlement ↗3. When those sessions reach the archive, the open questions from earlier stages are whether banks keep custody in-house, whether a shared compliance standard for tokenized securities takes hold, and whether Spain's secondary market for DLT securities opened on time 123.