Tokens entered finance with the promise of making payments and asset handling simpler. At Money20/20 USA, one of the payments and financial services industry's largest annual gatherings, a panel of industry practitioners made the case that the reality is considerably more tangled.

Stephen Richardson, CSO of digital asset infrastructure firm Fireblocks, joined Debbie Gamble of Interac, the Canadian payments network, 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. The panel's makeup — spanning a payments network, a major bank, and an infrastructure provider — reflected how the format question now reaches across layers of the financial system rather than staying confined to any one of them.

A panel built around a 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 beneath the surface

The panel flagged several complications that come with tokenization, with privacy concerns, subscription friction, and interoperability problems all drawing scrutiny.

Privacy is the most visible. 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 — a practical constraint for any institution whose activity crosses system boundaries.

Fireblocks' stake in the debate

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, an unusually candid position for a vendor selling into the space.

Fireblocks says it supports more than 2,500 institutions in their digital asset operations. The firm has processed trillions in transaction volume, with stablecoins — tokens pegged to a reference asset such as a fiat currency — making up a significantly growing share of that activity, a scale at which these format trade-offs become practical decisions rather than theoretical ones.

The company has also been widening what it supports. Fireblocks plans to add support for Cardano Native Tokens by March 2027, a dated roadmap item that gives institutions one concrete marker of how its format coverage continues to expand.

The panel's bottom line for institutions: choosing a token format is a trade-off exercise, not a search for a single winner.