Georges Bock
Founder and CEO

Georges Bock, Co-Founder and CEO of Investre S.A., has spent his career bridging traditional finance with the digital paradigms reshaping it. Under his leadership, Investre became the first CSSF-authorised Control Agent in Luxembourg under Blockchain IV Law in 2025, enabling the compliant issuance, safekeeping and settlement of fund shares on distributed ledgers. Before founding Investre, Georges spent 27 years at KPMG Luxembourg, holding several leadership roles including Managing Partner, Head of Tax, and Global Financial Services Digital Strategy Lead Partner — building deep expertise in investment management, structured finance, and regulation. Georges also serves as a Non-Executive Director for institutions including Bank Julius Baer Europe SA, Governance.com, and UNICEF Luxembourg.

Ala Presenti
Founder and CFO

Ala Presenti, Co-Founder and CFO of Investre S.A., is driven by a conviction that the traditional asset management industry is overdue for reinvention. At Investre, she brings the financial rigour and strategic discipline behind the firm’s mission to replace outdated infrastructure with blockchain-native solutions built for the future of fund management. Before co-founding Investre, Ala was Audit Manager at KPMG Luxembourg, developing deep expertise in financial systems, structured finance, and regulation. Beyond Investre, she is the author of Tomorrow Starts Today and an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Luxembourg — reflecting a long-held belief that bold, purposeful thinking is what moves industries forward.

A Million EUR Around the World in 80 Seconds

A Million EUR Around the World in 80 Seconds Phileas Fogg once wagered that he could travel around the world in eighty days. In today’s capital markets, the more important wager is no longer about moving the traveller. It is about moving the asset, the cash leg and the legal record—securely, lawfully and at institutional scale.

The wager changes when infrastructure changes

Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days captured a moment when new infrastructure was reorganising the possible. Published serially in 1872 and built around Phileas Fogg’s wager that he could circle the globe in eighty days, the novel turned rail, steam and synchronised transport into a story about distance collapsing under the force of new networks. If Verne were writing for the capital markets of 2026, Phileas Fogg would not bet that he could move himself around the world in eighty days. He would bet that he could move EUR 1 million around the world in eighty seconds—and thereby prove that the decisive transformation is no longer in the movement of people, but in the movement of capital. ¹https://www.britannica.com/topic/Around-the-World-in-Eighty-Days-by-Verne

That image works because tokenisation is easiest to misunderstand when we only look at the stopwatch. Speed is the visible feature. It is what makes headlines: T+0, instant transfer, atomic settlement, assets moving twenty-four hours a day. But the European Commission is now framing distributed ledger technology in much broader terms. In April 2026, DG FISMA wrote that DLT and tokenisation can reduce payment and settlement frictions, improve liquidity management, enable programmability and streamline reconciliation. Months earlier, Commissioner Maria Luís Albuquerque went even further, saying tokenisation is about rebuilding the machinery of finance and may become the new operating system of financial markets.²https://finance.ec.europa.eu/news/dlt-and-tokenisation-paving-way-internet-value-2026-04-21_en

That is the right frame for this moment. Tokenisation is not simply a smarter wrapper for old assets. It is an attempt to change the operating system underneath issuance, transfer, collateral, servicing and settlement. The essential question is therefore not only how fast a transaction can settle. The deeper question is whether financial markets are beginning to migrate away from a world of duplicated records, messaging layers and constant reconciliation toward a world in which the asset, its legal state and its transaction logic sit on a common digital infrastructure. ³https://finance.ec.europa.eu/news/dlt-and-tokenisation-paving-way-internet-value-2026-04-21_en

Why speed is the visible feature, not the real story

A useful analogy is the shift from fixed communications to mobile networks. The first obvious benefit of mobile telephony was mobility itself: you could communicate without being tied to a place. Once mobile networks and then smartphones matured, the device stopped being “just” a telephone and became a computing platform that combined communications, software, messaging, media and payments in a single object. The infrastructure change came first. The real wave of innovation followed afterwards. That is why the right comparison for DLT is not a prettier financial product. It is a deeper change in the rails on which the system runs. ⁴https://www.britannica.com/technology/mobile-telephone

Finance is at a similar threshold. The ECB now describes the promise of DLT as the creation of a shared transparent ledger on which functions that are currently spread across fragmented infrastructure can happen on the same platform. In the ECB’s own language, DLT can offer a “single source of truth”, reduce reconciliation, allow transactions to be automatically registered on the platform where trading and post-trading occur, and support an integrated system in which the asset, its governing rules and the settlement logic become far more tightly connected. That is why the real transformation is back-end, not cosmetic. The visible gain may be speed. The structural gain is a different architecture for record-keeping, transfer and control. ⁵https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/financial-stability-publications/macroprudential-bulletin/html/ecb.mpbu202604_02.en.html

It is also why the debate should stay grounded. The ECB estimates that tokenised assets on public blockchains were still only around EUR 38 billion in February 2026, compared with traditional financial assets measured in the hundreds of trillions. This is not yet a mature market. But the same ECB work makes the more important point: architecture choices made at small scale determine whether the market later scales on common rails or fractures into disconnected platform islands. The market is still small, but the infrastructure question is already large. ⁶https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/financial-stability-publications/macroprudential-bulletin/html/ecb.mpbu202604_02.en.html

Why Luxembourg matters

In Europe, legal progress has not been uniform. Switzerland brought its federal DLT Act fully into force in August 2021. Liechtenstein’s Token and TT Service Provider Act entered into force in January 2020. France adapted its securities framework so that bearer financial securities can be issued and processed through DLT. Within the European Union, Luxembourg has taken one of the most deliberate routes to making blockchain records work inside mainstream financial law rather than outside it. ⁷https://www.admin.ch/en/nsb?id=84035

Luxembourg matters because it is not experimenting from the margins. Luxembourg for Finance reported in March 2026 that assets under management across UCITS and AIFs had exceeded EUR 8 trillion, with alternative funds representing 35% of the total. Separately, CSSF statistics showed EUR 6.199 trillion of net assets in regulated Luxembourg investment funds at the end of 2025. In its 2024 annual report, the CSSF said that Luxembourg’s four blockchain laws give the country a robust regulatory framework and that the CSSF stands ready, through its Innovation Hub and specialist teams, to accompany supervised entities with guidance and workshops. That combination of scale, law and supervisory readiness is why Luxembourg matters to this story. ⁸https://www.luxembourgforfinance.com/en/news/luxembourg-financial-centre-records-strong-growth-across-sectors-in-2025/

The first three blockchain laws are the real foundation. The CSSF’s DLT white paper summarised the first two steps with unusual clarity: the 2019 law allowed securities to be maintained in distributed form and circulated by inscription in a distributed ledger, while the 2021 law allowed dematerialised securities and the securities issuance account to be maintained within or through secure electronic registration mechanisms, including DLT.

The 2023 law then implemented the EU DLT Pilot Regime in Luxembourg and clarified that financial instruments issued using DLT are recognised as financial instruments under Luxembourg financial-sector law. It also clarified that DLT-recorded financial instruments can benefit from Luxembourg’s collateral framework. ⁹https://www.cssf.lu/wp-content/uploads/DLT_WP.pdf

That point matters more than a chronological reading of the laws. Financial markets do not run on technical possibility alone. They run on enforceability. A blockchain record matters only if market participants know whether it constitutes a legally effective entry, whether transfers are recognised, whether rights can be exercised and whether collateral can be enforced. Luxembourg’s first three laws therefore did not try to create a separate legal universe. They progressively removed ambiguity from the existing one. In a field where technology moves faster than doctrine, that is what real infrastructure policy looks like. ¹⁰https://www.cssf.lu/wp-content/uploads/DLT_WP.pdf

The control agent is the real innovation of Block­chain Law IV

Blockchain Law IV matters because it adds a new institutional role to that legal base: the control agent. Under the consolidated law on dematerialised securities, a control agent must be an investment firm, a credit institution or a settlement organisation appointed by the issuer. Its statutory mission is threefold. It maintains the securities issuance account. It tracks, at any time, the holding chain of dematerialised securities. And it verifies that the total amount recorded in the issuance account is equal to the sum of the securities recorded in the relevant securities accounts. That is not a decorative role. It is the legal integrity layer of a DLT-native issuance model. ¹¹https://www.cssf.lu/wp-content/uploads/L_060413_dematerialised_securities.pdf

The parliamentary dossier makes clear that the model was designed as an alternative to the existing two-tier holding chain between the central account keeper and secondary account keepers. The same dossier explains that the new model draws on experience accumulated with DLT and allows the control agent to use that technology fully in carrying out its control function. In plain terms, the control agent becomes the orchestrator of correct on-chain recording on behalf of the issuer, while the ledger becomes the shared infrastructure through which different participants can see and rely on the same controlled state of the security. ¹²https://wdocs-pub.chd.lu/docs/compilation/docpa/pdf/8425_Dossier_Complet.pdf

That changes the mechanics of issuance in a very practical way. Blockchain Law IV provides that, where an issuer appoints a control agent, registered securities can be converted by the control agent updating the issuance account and crediting the converted securities to the relevant account keeper’s securities account through secure electronic registration mechanisms, including distributed ledgers or databases. The law also clarifies that, in a control-agent model, the issuer discharges its distribution obligation by paying a mandated paying agent, which then pays the relevant account holders designated by the control agent. In other words, Luxembourg did not merely recognise an on-chain record. It introduced a supervised actor designed to simplify the issue-distribution-accounting chain of dematerialised securities without abandoning legal control. ¹³https://www.cssf.lu/wp-content/uploads/L_060413_dematerialised_securities.pdf

In July 2025, Luxembourg for Finance announced that Investre had become the first entity to receive a control-agent licence from the CSSF under Blockchain Law IV. That matters because it shows the regime has moved from legislative design into supervised practice. In the parliamentary dossier, Luxembourg’s finance ministry told lawmakers that around 280 fintechs were already established in Luxembourg and about 40 were active in blockchain. Combined with the CSSF’s public commitment to support supervised entities through its Innovation Hub, that is strong evidence that Luxembourg is positioning itself for institutional-scale deployment rather than symbolic experimentation. ¹⁴https://www.luxembourgforfinance.com/en/news/first-control-agent-license-granted-for-tokenised-funds-under-new-blockchain-law/

Where tokenised funds become tangible

The fund industry is where all of this stops being theoretical. Tokenised money market funds are a particularly revealing example. In April 2026, the ECB wrote that tokenisation can enhance efficiency in money market funds by enabling faster settlement, near-24/7 availability and programmability, while opening new use cases such as using tokenised MMF shares as collateral. The same ECB analysis notes that investors can sell tokenised MMF shares directly on-chain, creating a secondary market for those shares, and that some structures already experiment with features such as intraday yield calculated in real time during transfers. This is why tokenised MMFs have become such an important test case: they sit exactly at the intersection of cash management, programmable collateral and fund distribution. ¹⁵https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/financial-stability-publications/macroprudential-bulletin/html/ecb.mpbu202604_04.en.html

But it is equally important not to romanticise the current stage. The ECB also stresses that most tokenised MMFs are not fully on-chain and that key processes often remain partly off-chain, so cut-off times, operational dependencies and liquidity risks have not disappeared. The lesson is not that tokenisation has failed. The lesson is that infrastructure changes arrive in layers: legal recognition first, then operating-model redesign, then liquidity, then scale. Luxembourg’s framework is valuable precisely because it is designed for that progression. It gives the market a way to move from mirrored records to authoritative records, from token overlays to native issuance. ¹⁶https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/financial-stability-publications/macroprudential-bulletin/html/ecb.mpbu202604_04.en.html

Alternative investment funds are the second major use case, especially in a market where alternative funds account for roughly 35% of total Luxembourg fund assets. Here the honest claim is not that tokenisation magically creates liquidity. EFAMA’s buy-side guide is explicit that tokenised fund shares may still face thin tradable liquidity in secondary markets, and that tokenisation can improve liquidity in illiquid markets but does not inherently create it. But tokenisation can still make a material difference by supporting fractionalisation, lowering transfer friction and easing secondary trading among existing holders. Deloitte has pointed to secondary market trading of tokenised fund units as a way to widen the attraction of traditionally less liquid funds, while EY argues that tokenisation can make entry and exit from assets such as private equity and real estate less burdensome than the legacy process. In that sense, the promise for AIFs is not synthetic liquidity. It is more orderly transferability. ¹⁷https://www.luxembourgforfinance.com/en/news/luxembourg-financial-centre-records-strong-growth-across-sectors-in-2025/

Europe still lacks the cash leg it needs

If there is one bottleneck that now stands out, it is no longer the tokenised asset itself. It is the tokenised cash leg. The European Commission’s own 2024 workshop on asset tokenisation framed the lack of a widely available on-chain settlement asset as one of the main reasons why secondary markets in tokenised financial instruments remain difficult to organise. The Eurosystem’s 2026 payments strategy says much the same thing in more institutional language: wholesale tokenised markets should keep central bank money as the anchor, but they also need private settlement assets such as EU-governed, euro-denominated tokenised deposits and properly designed stablecoins. In practical terms, Europe still lacks a large-scale, widely accepted euro-denominated programmable settlement asset that smart-contract-based finance can use with confidence. ¹⁸https://finance.ec.europa.eu/events/workshop-asset-tokenisation-2024-06-11_en

The strategic problem is that Europe is still small on that front. In July 2025, the ECB warned that roughly 99% of global stablecoin market capitalisation was dollar-denominated, while euro-denominated stablecoins remained marginal, at less than EUR 350 million. At the same time, the United States signed the GENIUS Act into law in July 2025, creating the first federal regulatory system for stablecoins, and the U.S. Treasury moved into implementation with a proposed rule in April 2026. Put bluntly, the United States now has both scale and federal legislative direction in the part of digital money that tokenised capital markets increasingly need. ¹⁹https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2025/html/ecb.blog20250728~e6cb3cf8b5.en.html

Why does that matter? Because infrastructure tends to lock in around what becomes usable first. The ECB has already warned that Europe heavily depends on proprietary standards controlled by international card schemes, and that most EU countries rely on international card schemes for card payments. If Europe does not accelerate the euro settlement layer for tokenised finance, it risks repeating that pattern in a new domain: assets issued under European law, but liquidity, payment standards or settlement habits drifting toward dollar-native infrastructure. The danger is commercial andarchitectural. ²⁰https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2025/html/ecb.pr250228_1~7f0697af45.en.html

The race has just begun

There is still every reason for optimism. ESMA said in June 2025 that the EU DLT Pilot Regime had seen initially limited uptake but was now attracting growing interest from potential applicants, and it recommended changes that would make the regime more permanent and more attractive. The ECB’s Pontes initiative is scheduled for initial launch in the third quarter of 2026 to connect DLT platforms to TARGET Services, while Appia is tasked with shaping the longer-term blueprint for a European tokenised financial ecosystem. In other words, Europe is no longer just discussing tokenisation. It is beginning to lay out the public rails around it. ²¹https://www.esma.europa.eu/press-news/esma-news/esma-suggests-amendments-dlt-pilot-regime-make-it-permanent

That is why the next twenty-four months matter so much. This is the window in which Europe can decide whether tokenisation will remain a collection of pilots, proofs of concept and fragmented platforms, or become a coherent financial-market infrastructure

built on European governance, euro-denominated settlement assets and legally effective digital records. Luxembourg has already shown what one part of that answer looks like: legal certainty first, institutional roles second, industrial fund use cases third. The task now is not to admire the framework. It is to scale it. ²²https://www.cssf.lu/wp-content/uploads/CSSF_RA_2024_EN.pdf

So the modern Phileas Fogg question is not whether EUR 1 million can move around the world in eighty seconds. Increasingly, it can. The real question is: on whose rails, in which currency, under what law, and with what degree of trust, finality and strategic independence? Luxembourg has done serious groundwork to ensure that one answer can be: on regulated rails, with legally effective blockchain records, and at institutional scale. Europe should now continue, accelerate and compete for the financial-services infrastructure of the future. The race has only just started. But outcomes are often decided earlier than they seem. ²³https://www.luxembourgforfinance.com/en/news/first-control-agent-license-granted-for-tokenised-funds-under-new-blockchain-law/