I’ve been reading tokenization through the private sector — banks, issuers, infrastructure providers. A speech Governor Ueda gave in March, which I only got to this week, suggests that framing is too narrow. The BOJ has a sandbox underway testing central bank money in current account deposits for domestic interbank and securities settlement on blockchain, with findings feeding into BOJ-NET.
Ueda goes further than the sandbox, though. He describes central bank money as the thing that makes different blockchain systems interoperable — the bridge letting payment instruments exchange at par value across systems that otherwise wouldn’t connect.
That is an answer to the question I would have asked. Markets may not need to converge on one settlement asset if central bank money sits underneath all of them. What I don’t yet know is whether that holds when the systems above it are privately operated and competing.