Reports
Long-form research, fully cited.
Each report is available as an embedded, readable PDF with a download and citation block — APA and BibTeX included.
- Read report →Note
Regulating Decentralised Finance in the European Union
A compte rendu and analysis of a closed-door, non-attribution roundtable held in May 2026 — convening regulators, supervisors, legal practitioners, academics, exchange operators, protocol builders, and policy specialists around the European Commission's consultation on decentralised finance (DeFi), launched ahead of the mandatory review of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). The discussion converged on several structuring findings: that the threshold question is not how to regulate DeFi but whether identified risks justify regulation at all, and that "sufficient decentralisation" remains undefined and would benefit from sharper analytical tools.
Zakaryae Boudi · June 11, 2026
- Read report →Technical ReportMembers
Settlement Plumbing
A systematic, operational account of how trades become final, irrevocable transfers of value across financial markets and payment systems. "Settlement plumbing" denotes the layered set of institutions, accounts, contracts, messages, and risk controls — clearing, payment, and securities settlement — through which an agreement to exchange value is transformed into settled obligations. Prepared for institutional readers, regulators, infrastructure providers, banks, market makers, and tokenization researchers, it covers institutions, accounts, messages, money, collateral, netting, finality, and failure.
Zakaryae Boudi · June 10, 2026
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Digital Assets: the Future of Finance?
An analysis of the "Digital Assets: the Future of Finance?" plenary roundtable convened at the Paris Finance Forum under the Paris Europlace banner — moderated by Bloomberg's Claudia Cohen, with principals from BlackRock, CACEIS, Standard Chartered, Circle, and Euroclear. Read against a maturing regulatory backdrop (MiCA's first review, the US GENIUS and forthcoming Clarity Acts, the UK's call for evidence), the note captures institutional consensus and its remaining fault lines as the technology moves from experiment to infrastructure, organized around five themes: the shift from experimentation to production, demand-side use cases, architecture and interoperability, the contest over money and sovereignty, and the conditions under which the market scales.
Zakaryae Boudi · June 9, 2026
- Read report →Working Paper
Overstated Unencumbered Mint Capacity
A case discussion of a fiat-backed stablecoin failure mode that requires no stolen mint key, no falsified bank statement, no broken ERC-20, and no direct contract exploit. The system overstates how much it can safely mint because claims and reserves are measured on incompatible finality clocks, and because the authorization join between them is left unguarded. Every component is correct in isolation — the token contract is sound, the bank report honest, the bridge verifies its messages, the attestation accurately scoped — yet the failure lives in the seams between them, where one ledger's notion of 'done' is handed to another that means something different by it. The thesis is narrow: form is not finality.
Zakaryae Boudi · June 7, 2026
- Read report →Working Paper
The Trillion-Dollar Proof
Tokenization is no longer a thesis but a migration: with on-chain real-world assets at roughly $20–22 billion today and sell-side projections running from Citi's $5.5 trillion to as much as $30 trillion by 2030, the value whose safety depends on smart-contract logic is set to climb by about three orders of magnitude — even as the security record of the rails remains poor. This working paper surveys the formal-verification tooling landscape for tokenized finance and argues that securing it at scale requires two layers that blockchain security is still missing.
Zakaryae Boudi · June 3, 2026
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Operability in Tokenized Finance with AI
Operability — not capability — is what has held tokenized finance back. As financial systems move from static to programmable instruments and from isolated platforms to composable markets, safely overseeing a tokenized workflow outgrows what a human can realistically manage, while today's AI agents and real-world financial infrastructure suffer a structural mismatch: agents work best in structured environments, but even mature tokenized systems are fragmented, brittle, and opaque. This IEI note argues the answer lies in operationalizing context into structured inputs for AI agents and constraining those agents to behave predictably — in ways that remain verifiable, auditable, and interpretable to humans — and previews the Institute's 2026 research agenda on the problem.
Zakaryae Boudi, Jiulin Teng · June 2, 2026
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The Programmable CSD
A tokenized note on the programmable Central Securities Depository: how settlement, custody, and corporate-actions infrastructure changes when the depository layer itself becomes programmable — and what that implies for market structure, finality, and governance.
Zakaryae Boudi · January 25, 2026
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Institutional Tokenization in the Year Ahead: Scale in 2026 with 2025 Lessons
A perspective on where institutional tokenization is heading: what 2025 taught the market, and the conditions required to move from pilots to production scale in 2026 — across infrastructure, standards, and the institutions that must adopt them.
Zakaryae Boudi, Jiulin Teng · January 5, 2026
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Tokenized Notes — Sibos 2025
A field note from Sibos 2025. In twelve months the conversation has shifted decisively from “what if” to “how fast” and “at what scale,” with the spotlight tilting firmly toward tokenized money — stablecoins, deposit tokens, and the rails that will carry them.
Intelligence Economy Institute · October 7, 2025
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DAZ for DeFi: Institutional-Grade Digital Finance through Digital Access Zones
Over the past decade decentralized finance has advanced from experimental smart contracts into a sophisticated ecosystem supporting billions in value. This note introduces Digital Access Zones (DAZ) as a way to bring institutional-grade compliance and controls to DeFi without sacrificing composability.
Zakaryae Boudi, Jiulin Teng · September 11, 2025
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What Tokenization Can Do for Development Finance
A detailed report on how programmable, tokenized infrastructure can serve development finance — widening access to capital, lowering settlement friction, and bringing transparency and traceability to development-finance flows where they are most needed.
Intelligence Economy Institute · July 23, 2025
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A Tokenized Path out of AML Isolation
How verifiable, programmable compliance can reconnect under-served jurisdictions to the global financial system — strengthening anti-money-laundering safeguards rather than weakening them, and offering a path out of de-risking and financial isolation.
Intelligence Economy Institute · June 19, 2025
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Unlocking Scalability and Interoperability in Tokenization Systems — Chapter 2
Chapter 2 of the FeverTokens × Caisse des Dépôts working paper. It extends the architecture toward cross-system settlement and interoperability, detailing the mechanisms that let tokenization systems communicate and settle across heterogeneous ledgers and traditional rails.
Intelligence Economy Institute, Caisse des Dépôts · April 2, 2025
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DebLeb Finance: A Decentralized Banking Protocol for Lebanon
A working paper proposing DebLeb Finance — a tokenized, rules-based banking protocol designed to help rebuild trust and function in Lebanon's collapsed banking system, combining programmable settlement with transparent, verifiable governance.
Zakaryae Boudi, Sara Kawas, Saman Sarbazvatan, Jiulin Teng, Hervé Alexandre, Ali Chehab · December 11, 2024
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Unlocking Scalability and Interoperability in Tokenization Systems — Chapter 1
Chapter 1 of the FeverTokens × Caisse des Dépôts working paper. It frames the scalability and interoperability constraints that tokenization systems must overcome to move from isolated pilots to connected, production-grade market infrastructure.
Intelligence Economy Institute, Caisse des Dépôts · November 14, 2024
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Moving Digital Assets: The Imperative of Modular, Composable, and Interconnected Tokenization Systems
The promise of tokenization — efficiency, transparency, accessibility — cannot be realized unless the underlying systems are modular, open, composable, and interconnected at scale. This note makes the case for interoperable rails across DLT and traditional financial systems for the movement, settlement, and transformation of assets.
Intelligence Economy Institute · October 1, 2024
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Tokenized Economies: A New Paradigm
The foundational paper setting out the thesis that tokenization is not a product or asset class but an economic paradigm — and a first map of the infrastructure, standards, and institutions that paradigm will require.
Zakaryae Boudi, Jiulin Teng, Sara Kawas, Saman Sarbazvatan · June 25, 2024
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The Imperative of Integrating International Financial Standards into Tokenization Protocols
Tokenized systems cannot stand apart from the financial system they aim to serve. This paper argues that tokenization protocols must terminate in the disclosure, messaging, and instrument standards finance already uses — and shows where that integration has to happen.
Zakaryae Boudi, Jiulin Teng, Sara Kawas, Saman Sarbazvatan · April 28, 2024
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Towards a B-Method Framework for Smart Contract Verification: The Case of ACTUS Financial Contracts
The increasing use of advanced smart contract structures in finance necessitates rigor and scalability in ensuring their correctness. Traditional auditing falls short of comprehensive security; formal verification offers a robust, scalable approach to secure-by-design models. We introduce a B-method framework for modeling and verifying smart contracts based on the ACTUS standard for financial instruments, converting ACTUS specifications into B-method constructs to systematically model, analyze, and verify financial contract implementations on-chain.
Zakaryae Boudi, Mohamed Toub · December 26, 2023
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Scaling Climate Action: Unleashing Innovative Technologies in Sustainable Finance
A report from the BIS Innovation Hub (COP28 TechSprint) on how innovative technologies — including tokenization and digital infrastructure — can scale sustainable finance and mobilise capital for climate action.
BIS Innovation Hub · December 4, 2023