AMSTERDAM, June 5 (Reuters) - Banks which for years have

talked about creating 'tokenised' versions of assets like bonds

and currencies say a shift to blockchain-based trading is taking

longer than expected, with some investors cautious about the

idea.

By creating tokenised assets - usually blockchain-based

tokens to represent holdings of mainstream assets such as

currencies or bonds - banks hope to make it more efficient,

faster and cheaper to trade, and easier to record who owns want.

Consultants and digital asset executives predict that a

significant proportion of the world's assets will be tokenised

via blockchain - HSBC ( HSBC ) and Northern Trust ( NTRS ) said in a note last

year they expected 5% to 10% of all assets by 2030.

But executives speaking at the Money20/20 fintech conference

this week said the shift to digital versions of assets was

moving slowly.

"It's taken longer than I expected, to be honest, to get to

the point where we are in this space," Ryan Rugg, Head of

Digital Assets for Citibank's trade and treasury solutions

business told the Amsterdam event.

"We've experimented with money markets and bonds but nothing

that's live and scaling right now, the only application that we

have live is a tokenised deposit."

Despite this, Rugg said she remained enthusiastic about

tokenisation with the aim to create a tokenised deposit that can

be sent 24/7, 365 days a year, avoiding cut-offs in different

timezones or for banking holidays.

Clients are requesting it and the token has been live since

last year, Rugg added.

While there have been various experimental projects - for

example, to create blockchain-based bonds - tokenised trading

lacks a liquid secondary market.

Having spent seven years attempting to re-build its software

platform around blockchain, Australia's stock exchange

eventually "paused" the project and announced last year the

upgrade would no longer involve the technology.

Monica Long, president of U.S. crypto firm Ripple, told

Reuters that many U.S. banks have "put digital asset services a

bit on hold".

Ripple last year acquired crypto custody firm Metaco and

Long said it was going well - pointing to a recent partnership

with HSBC ( HSBC ).

One of the main impediments to trading traditional assets

via blockchain is that banks are working on their own networks,

executives say, making it difficult to trade across platforms.

"Fragmentation slows down adoption, as investors don't want

to connect to dozens of different networks," said Julien

Clausse, head of BNP Paribas' digital asset platform

AssetFoundry ahead of the event.

"More likely than not, we will continue to operate in a

hybrid world for years to come, with some domains more actively

tokenised because of the perceived benefits, and some others

remaining in a the traditional world," Clausse said.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Howcroft

Editing by Tommy Reggiori Wilkes and Ros Russell)