Abstract
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.
Executive summary
This note analyzes Digital Assets: the Future of Finance?, a plenary roundtable at the Paris Finance Forum — the annual Paris Europlace gathering of European and global capital-market principals. Moderated by Bloomberg's Claudia Cohen, the panel was unusually senior, spanning the asset management, market infrastructure, banking, and stablecoin-issuance segments of the digital-asset value chain: Adam Baker (BlackRock), Jean-Jacques Barberis (CACEIS), Mandy DeFilippo (Standard Chartered), Dante Disparte (Circle), and Valérie Urbain (Euroclear).
The conversation took place against a maturing regulatory backdrop — MiCA now live and entering its first review, the US layering the GENIUS Act and a forthcoming Clarity Act onto a permissive regime, and the UK issuing its own call for evidence. Read as a snapshot of institutional consensus and its remaining fault lines, the analysis is organized around five themes: the shift from experimentation to production, the demand-side use cases, the architecture and interoperability challenge, the contest over money and sovereignty, and the conditions under which the market scales — closing with the implications for European market participants. The full note is available below.