Scalable blockchains underpin shift to tokenised finance

Blockchain networks are moving from experimental infrastructure towards a broader role in digital finance as developers increasingly raise transaction capacity and institutions test tokenised settlement at scale.

The shift is being driven by advances in layer-two networks, data-availability systems and higher-capacity base chains to overcome the congestion, cost and latency that have limited blockchain use beyond cryptocurrency trading. Ethereum is pursuing simultaneous expansion of its main network and rollup capacity, while financial authorities are testing shared ledgers for payments and securities.

Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap places scaling at the centre of protocol development. Its Foundation says the network has already doubled its mainnet gas limit from 30 million to 60 million after upgrades in 2025, while the Fusaka upgrade introduced PeerDAS, allowing validators to sample rather than download all blob data. That change increased theoretical blob capacity eightfold and created room for rollups, which execute transactions away from the base chain before publishing proofs or data back to Ethereum.

The next major Ethereum upgrade, Glamsterdam, is targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026. Planned changes include block-level access lists and proposer-builder separation, intended to support parallel processing, higher execution capacity and further increases in data availability. The Foundation’s longer-term target is to push the gas limit beyond 100 million while preserving decentralisation and network resilience.

Rollups are already substantially cheaper than transactions executed directly on Ethereum’s base layer. Ethereum’s technical documentation says current rollups can be five to 20 times cheaper than layer-one transactions, while further improvements to zero-knowledge proofs, blob capacity and data availability could cut costs further. Full Danksharding, still under development, is intended eventually to enable throughput exceeding 100,000 transactions per second.

Scaling is becoming more important as tokenisation spreads from crypto-native markets into regulated finance. The International Monetary Fund said in July that tokenisation could alter financial architecture by putting ownership, transfer and settlement on programmable shared ledgers. Transactions that now pass through separate execution, clearing and reconciliation stages could, under certain designs, be completed simultaneously through smart contracts.

The Bank for International Settlements has reached a similar point through Project Agorá, a collaboration involving eight central banks and more than 40 regulated financial institutions. The prototype demonstrated atomic settlement of wholesale cross-border payments using tokenised commercial bank deposits and tokenised central bank reserves. The project is advancing towards testing with real-value transactions involving selected currencies and participants.

Such experiments illustrate why throughput alone is not enough. Digital economies require networks capable of handling large transaction volumes without sacrificing security, finality or affordable participation for validators and users. They also require interoperability between different ledgers, reliable settlement assets and legal frameworks capable of recognising digitally recorded ownership and automated contractual execution.

The BIS has warned that fragmentation remains a major obstacle. Public blockchains operate across numerous base networks and secondary layers that do not always communicate seamlessly, while permissioned systems can differ in identity rules, governance and data policies. Bridges linking networks can introduce operational and security risks, making interoperability a central engineering and regulatory challenge.

The IMF has also cautioned that faster settlement can redistribute rather than eliminate risk. Its work on tokenised finance says smart contracts and shared ledgers can reduce reconciliation costs and enable continuous liquidity management, but failures may become concentrated in software, infrastructure operators and governance arrangements. Legal certainty, robust code governance and trusted settlement assets therefore remain essential.

For businesses, scalable blockchains could support applications ranging from cross-border payments and securities settlement to decentralised finance, gaming, digital identity and machine-to-machine transactions. Lower transaction costs are especially important for high-frequency, low-value activity, where even small fees can make blockchain systems commercially impractical.

Developers are consequently pursuing several scaling models rather than a single architecture. These include execution on layer-two rollups, higher-capacity layer-one networks, data-availability sampling, parallel processing and zero-knowledge proofs that compress large amounts of transaction information into verifiable cryptographic evidence.