Global Digital Finance
Global Digital Finance, known as GDF, is an industry association that promotes market standards and best practices for the use of crypto and digital assets. GDF develops these standards and its governance rules together with member firms, policymakers and regulators, and the annual fees of its members fund the work.
The members of GDF include banks such as Standard Chartered, payment firms such as PayPal, crypto exchanges, stablecoin issuers, law firms and the large audit firms. They work in forums and working groups on stablecoins, tokenized money market funds and policy in the European Union and the United States. GDF also holds a forum that is open only to regulators.
Members and membership
GDF has 46 member firms in four categories: patron members, Advisory Council members, working members and partners. Among them are the bank Standard Chartered, the asset manager Federated Hermes, the exchanges Binance, Crypto.com and Archax, and the payment firms PayPal and Block. Infrastructure and data providers such as Fireblocks, R3 and Elliptic are members, as are the law firms Hogan Lovells and Latham & Watkins and the audit firms Deloitte, EY and PwC.
The Advisory Council is the member-led advisory body of GDF and meets every month with the executive team. Together they set the priorities of each year, based on surveys among the members and the wider community of the association.
Working groups and industry standards
The working groups of GDF include a Global Stablecoin Working Group, policy and regulatory groups for the European Union and the United States, and a group on tokenized money market funds. In November 2025 that group published a report and industry sandbox results on the legal certainty of tokenized money market funds as collateral in Luxembourg, Ireland and the UK. Ireland and Luxembourg host more than 80 percent of the money market funds in Europe, and the credit support annex used for collateral is governed by English law.
With the FIX Trading Community, GDF works on bringing tokenized assets to any trading platform with a FIX connection. Together with ACI Financial Markets Association it runs a Joint Standards Stewardship Working Group, which Kaiko and EY joined as supporting partners in June 2025.
Code of conduct and taxonomy
On 31 October 2018 GDF announced its founding members, the firms Circle, Coinbase, ConsenSys, DLA Piper, Diginex, Hogan Lovells and R3. At the same time GDF released its industry code of conduct together with a taxonomy for cryptographic assets, after a 60-day public consultation and mini-summits in Asia, Europe and the United States. The code covers conduct with clients, the handling of client money, risk management and market practice, and firms could attest their adoption of it from 2019 in a registration scheme led by DLA Piper.
Upcoming blockchain and digital asset events
Board, chair and the Regulator ONLY Forum
Lawrence Wintermeyer chairs the Members Board of GDF, with Simon Taylor and Malcolm Wright as vice chairs. A Board of Advisors and Observers is co-chaired by Greg Medcraft, the former chair of the Australian regulator ASIC and of IOSCO, and by John D'Agostino. Officials such as Peter Kerstens of the European Commission sit on that board as observers.
Stephane Malrait chairs the Regulator ONLY Forum, to which GDF invites more than 60 global and national agencies. GDF also brings experienced practitioners into its work as Executives and Practitioners in Residence, and the fifth cohort of this program started in March 2026.
Registered office in London
Global Digital Finance Limited is a company limited by guarantee without share capital, incorporated in England on 10 March 2018 under number 11246402. The registered office is at 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, and the company is classified as a professional membership organization. When it announced its founding members in 2018, GDF named London, New York and Hong Kong as its bases.
Global Digital Finance and Finance Loop
The working groups of GDF on stablecoins and tokenized money market funds deal with questions that Finance Loop members in Germany and Europe discuss as well, from the rules for collateral to the reserves behind stablecoins. Finance Loop brings people from banks, asset managers and digital asset firms together at its events on tokenization and digital money.
Finance Loop is a professional network and has the goal of driving the institutional use of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty, and Risk & Compliance.