Tokens were supposed to make finance simpler. At Money20/20 USA, a panel of practitioners made the case that the real picture is more complicated.
Stephen Richardson of Fireblocks joined Debbie Gamble of Interac and Elizabeth St.-Onge of TD Bank to sort through a crowded field of token formats. Their shared conclusion: each format solves one problem and tends to create a fresh one.
A panel built around a very specific question
The session ran under a title that doubled as a warning label: “There’s Dozens of Token Types: Defining Which One for What Use Case.” It took place at Money20/20 USA 2026, held October 18-21 in Las Vegas.
The discussion centered on three areas where token formats are being put to work: payments, identity management, and asset management. In each case, the panelists weighed what a given format fixes against what it breaks.
The trade-offs nobody puts on the brochure
The panel flagged several of the new complications that come with tokenization. Privacy concerns came up, along with subscription friction and interoperability problems.
Privacy is the obvious one. A format designed for transparency and easy auditing can expose more information than a customer or a bank would like to share.
Subscription friction is subtler. Recurring payments are routine in traditional finance, but some token setups make that kind of repeat billing harder to arrange smoothly.
Interoperability may be the most consequential of the three. Different tokens do not always talk to each other, which means a format that works inside one system can stall at the border of another.
Fireblocks used the session to underline its role as a provider of underlying infrastructure for tokenization and stablecoin operations. The company acknowledged that the various token types cut both ways, which is an unusually candid position for a vendor selling into the space.
Why Fireblocks has a seat at this table
Fireblocks says it supports more than 2,500 institutions in their digital asset operations. The firm has processed trillions in transaction volume, with stablecoins making up a significantly growing share of that activity.
Fireblocks has also been widening what it supports. The company plans to add support for Cardano Native Tokens by March 2027.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Kaye Quema. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.