Financial institutions are accelerating tokenisation pilots, but many still lack clarity on what happens between initiating a transaction and achieving final settlement on a public blockchain. On the sidelines of the Singapore FinTech Festival 2025, Delane Foo, APAC managing director at Nethermind, discussed why public-chain settlement remains a “black box” for institutions, where the biggest operational frictions lie and how greater visibility is becoming essential as tokenisation moves beyond pilots. Founded eight years ago as an Ethereum engineering team, Nethermind has grown into one of the core engineering contributors to the Web3 ecosystem—working across infrastructure, research and security, and operating one of the key execution clients that powers and secures approximately 25–30% of the Ethereum network. Foo said this gives the firm direct visibility into parts of the stack most institutions “never see but are expected to trust”, from how transactions are processed to how they ultimately land on-chain. Today, Nethermind positions itself as an institutional infrastructure partner—helping banks and asset managers understand, secure and build on public blockchain networks through deep protocol engineering, research support and privacy-preserving tooling. This firm supports institutions that require both technical assurance and regulatory alignment before using public blockchain infrastructure. “Institutions are comfortable issuing a transaction,” Foo said, “but not understanding what happens after it leaves the wallet.” Mapping the settlement journey One example is the firm’s whitepaper with Deutsche Bank, which documents and maps the full settlement lifecycle for tokenised assets on public blockchain infrastructure. Foo said the work helps institutions and regulators translate blockchain processes into concepts familiar to traditional finance—particularly around execution, ordering and finality. This type of mapping, she added, allows institutions to evaluate operational risk, internal controls and settlement obligations more clearly. “Regulated institutions need predictable, explainable behaviour in the parts of the stack they don’t control,” she said. Where banks face structural gaps Foo highlighted three areas where institutions continue to face significant friction: The first is interoperability. Cross-chain fragmentation and inconsistent regulatory treatment across markets make it difficult for banks to move tokenised assets without creating liquidity or reconciliation issues. The second point of friction is cost-efficient scalability. While financial institutions may perceive public blockchain infrastructure like Ethereum to be congested or expensive, Foo explained that Ethereum Layer-2 solutions already provide scalable, cost-effective infrastructure that inherits Ethereum’s security while delivering much higher throughput. She pointed to emerging “based rollup” technology (a next-generation Layer-2 model aligned with Ethereum’s base layer), such as Nethermind’s Surge — which is being deployed with Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a Web3 naming protocol that turns long blockchain addresses into human-readable identifiers — as an example of how Ethereum supports high-volume activity without sacrificing security or cost efficiency. The third is privacy and compliance. Institutions need assurance that sensitive flows will not be exposed on public networks, she said, adding that Nethermind increasingly supports banks with privacy-preserving routing, compliance tooling and infrastructure hardening. Preparing for agentic and automated finance Foo also highlighted Nethermind’s early work in supporting AI-driven, “agentic” financial processes. She said the firm’s AuditAgent—designed to analyze or scan smart contracts to detect potential security vulnerabilities and provide best-practice guidance—was recently referenced in a joint report by Clifford Chance and Deutsche Bank, as well as in a report on Project Guardian—the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s initiative to test and scale institutional-grade digital assets, including tokenised bonds, funds and deposits. The purpose of AuditAgent, she noted, is not to replace human oversight but to streamline security reviews, improve transparency and make smart contract development more accessible. Beyond banks, Foo said Nethermind has also served as a research and engineering partner for asset managers such as KAIO (formerly Libre Capital), contributing to their real-world-asset tokenisation platform. “We built the first version of the platform and were primarily responsible for the blockchain infrastructure," she explained. "Our role focused on the technical foundation and blockchain components of their issuance and lifecycle stack.” Working with APAC’s regulated markets Across Asia Pacific, Nethermind is also partnering with banks and regulators as they test tokenised asset flows and privacy tools. In Japan, the firm operates infrastructure on Japan Open Chain—a public, Ethereum-compatible network governed by a consortium including Dentsu, NTT Communications and Minna Bank—to support emerging digital-asset and stablecoin use cases. Foo said demand for tokenised assets in the region is rising as regulatory frameworks mature. “Once the foundational issues are solved—routing, privacy, predictability—many more institutions will follow,” she said. Clarifying public and private chains Early tokenisation efforts relied heavily on private ledgers, but Foo believes long-term settlement will increasingly anchor to secure public networks. The challenge is giving institutions the controls, privacy layers and compliance guarantees they need to operate with confidence. “In the long run, public settlement will coexist with private workflows,” Foo said. “But the settlement layer needs to be robust, transparent and explainable for institutions to trust it.” Her view reflects a broader regulatory trend: major markets in Asia and Europe are experimenting with public blockchain infrastructure for institutional tokenisation, sharpening the need for transparent, explainable settlement paths. As banks move from pilots to production, Foo said success will depend on understanding—and controlling—what happens in the parts of the stack that are today hardest to see. “Tokenisation isn’t just a front-end experiment,” she said. “It’s a question of whether the underlying infrastructure behaves in a way institutions can rely on.”
