Inside DTCC's Tokenization Service
DTCC is rolling out its tokenization service in July with 50 institutions. The model is deliberately conservative: securities stay in traditional custody, while onchain entitlements move across chains.
Louis Tellier
May 14, 2026
Production milestone: Last week, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) shared new details on the rollout of its tokenization service. Starting in July, DTCC plans to facilitate a first set of production trades, developed with input from a 50+ firm industry working group that includes JPMorgan, HSBC, Citi, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq, Ondo Finance, Circle and others.
Why it matters: DTCC sits at the center of U.S. capital markets. As the world’s largest and most systemically important central securities depository, it safeguards more than $114 trillion in assets and processes over $4.7 quadrillion in securities transactions each year. Its tokenization rollout lands amid broader momentum, with tokenized equities now above $1.4 billion and players like Nasdaq and ICE pushing deeper into the space.
Where DTCC fits: Unlike platforms focused on issuance, trading, or distribution, DTCC sits at the post-trade layer, where tokenization affects custody, clearing, settlement, and the official ownership record.
Green light by the SEC: Extending the ownership record into onchain representations required a specific regulatory green light. DTCC’s tokenization service is anchored in the SEC’s December 2025 no-action letter, which grants a three-year framework to operate a blockchain-based post-trade layer. Under that framework, DTCC issues tokenized entitlements: digital instruments that mirror the economic rights of an underlying asset while the security itself stays in traditional custody.
Same job, more ledgers: That structure reflects how DTCC sees the depository function evolving. Rather than tokenizing the underlying securities themselves, DTCC is extending the role it has performed for decades — maintaining a single record of who owns what — by issuing onchain representations that stay synchronized with that record.
“Our job has always been to maintain the record of ownership in this market,” Nadine Chakar, Global Head of DTCC Digital Assets, told Blockstories. “We have managed things in a ledger for the past 55 years. Now we’re going to move forward to many more ledgers.”
How it works: The mechanics of that multi-ledger model run through ComposerX, the tokenization platform DTCC developed after acquiring fintech firm Securrency in 2023. The flow is essentially a two-way swap between a participant’s traditional and digital positions:
A participant requests a conversion through a client interface or API. ComposerX issues a tokenized entitlement and deposits it into the wallet of the participant’s choice. The underlying security stays in DTCC’s traditional custody.
The reverse works the same way: a participant can return a tokenized entitlement, which ComposerX burns, restoring the position to its traditional form. Each tokenized entitlement carries the same CUSIP as its traditional counterpart to avoid splitting liquidity between the two forms.
Multi-chain by design: Once a token is in a participant’s wallet, it can move across more than one blockchain. Canton Network was the first supported network, with others expected to follow.
“Canton Network was our first network, and it won’t be the last. We hope to have additional ones ready by July. If not, they will be ready by October,” Chakar told Blockstories.
No bridges: Movement between those networks goes through a mint-and-burn model rather than bridging. Tokens can move into any registered wallet on any supported network, and participants are free to deploy them across DeFi, provided the token remains in a compliant state.
The netting question: The same conservative logic shapes how DTCC thinks about settlement. The infrastructure could technically support atomic settlement for delivery-versus-payment transactions, but DTCC argues this would dramatically increase funding needs for participants. Its current netting efficiency sits around 98%, meaning atomic settlement at scale would require liquidity the market is not yet structured to provide.
“The technology supports atomic settlement, but the question is: should we?” Chakar said. “We’ve spent five decades ensuring that the markets are efficient, scalable, secure, and safe. The last thing we want to do is uproot all that.”
What’s next: Between July and October, the 50 participating institutions will test the service in live conditions, with DTCC gathering feedback on what works and what does not. In parallel, DTCC is preparing its Collateral AppChain, a shared infrastructure platform designed to support 24/7 collateral management across traditional markets and blockchains, integrating Chainlink for automated workflows around margining, optimization, and settlement. The launch is targeted for Q4 2026.
Daniel Coheur joined Apex Group as Global Head of Digital Assets following the fund administrator’s acquisition of Tokeny, the Luxembourg-based tokenization platform he co-founded. With its Apex Digital 3.0 platform and its work around the ERC-3643 standard, Apex Group is making a big push into tokenization.
What does DTCC’s move into production mean for the adoption of tokenized securities in capital markets, and what is still missing to achieve scale?
DTCC moving into live production is a significant milestone, but its near-term impact is more about institutional validation than immediate scale. It reduces perceived risk for both institutions and regulators, supports internal prioritization within banks and asset managers, and begins to create early network effects, even if initially within a controlled environment.
However, several critical elements are still missing before tokenized securities can scale across capital markets.
The most important gap is the absence of a fully functional onchain cash leg, which limits true delivery-versus-payment.
Interoperability across platforms and standards remains fragmented, distribution and investor access are not yet scalable, and regulatory clarity, particularly across jurisdictions, is still evolving.
Today, market participants also have limited economic incentives to migrate fully from existing systems.
What is needed now is further ecosystem development, stronger coordination across market participants, and infrastructure that can support tokenized assets beyond isolated production environments.
Adam Sporn is Head of Prime Brokerage and Institutional Sales at BitGo, an institutional digital asset infrastructure provider offering custody services. The company is among the 50 firms participating in DTCC’s working group to test its new tokenization service.
Where do you see tokenization delivering the greatest benefit in capital markets?
One of the biggest opportunities is around collateral efficiency, where institutions can potentially move collateral faster, improve transparency, and reduce operational friction across financing markets.
We are already seeing growing demand from institutions that want to keep assets securely held in regulated custody while still using them in lending and financing transactions.