- Key insight: The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation has been putting the pieces together to create a blockchain of blockchains that will digitize stocks and track them wherever they go.
- Relevant stats: The organization processed $4.7 quadrillion worth of transactions in 2025.
- Forward look: The DTCC plans to take its tokenization network live in October.
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, the enormous vault and clearinghouse for most Wall Street trades, is building the ability to let securities become digital assets, while continuing to process the trading and custody of them.
Since being authorized by the Securities and Exchange Commission in December, DTCC has been pulling together a variety of collaborations it started over the past few years that it is combining into one comprehensive digital-asset platform that will let investors buy and sell stocks and other assets digitally across any member blockchain or platform. If it works at scale, it would essentially bring the technology behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to Wall Street.
"We are the recordkeepers of the market today, in a traditional sense, and we will be the record keepers of tomorrow in a digital sense," Nadine Chakar, global head of DTCC digital assets, told American Banker. "The super power that we have is we can bring the old and the new together."
The DTCC is owned and used by thousands of financial institutions, including JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America as well as broker-dealers and asset managers. Its DTC subsidiary is a New York trust company and a state member bank of the Federal Reserve System. In 2012, DTC was designated as a systemically important financial market utility by the Financial Stability Oversight Council. The DTCC clears and settles virtually all trading of stocks and bonds and other securities trades in the U.S. It holds custody of $115 trillion worth of securities and in 2025, it processed $4.7 quadrillion in securities transactions.
The bones of this new digital-asset trading platform have been coming together for some time. DTCC has announced a steady drip of digital-asset collaborations – with Digital Asset's Canton Network, the Stellar Network, Hyperledger Besu and Securitize, among others — over the past two years.
It's using these as building blocks for a tokenization network that will give members the option to let their clients convert stock or ETF holdings into digital assets. If a customer wants to turn some shares into digital tokens, perhaps to use them as collateral for a digital-asset product, the customer will tell their broker or bank, which will instruct the DTCC to convert those assets to digital tokens and deposit them in a digital wallet, where the customer can access them. Users can choose any digital wallet they want, as long as it works with the blockchain they want to use.
The tokens will be smart contracts embedded with securities-reference data, so that information about the securities will be baked in. The tokens will be "compliance aware," Chakar said, and programmed to stop what they're doing before they break any compliance rules. Also, "if the wallet isn't recognizable as a 'good guy' wallet, we'll stop and we'll inform whoever needs to be informed, very similar to what we do today," she said.
Financial-service providers will have a shared record of ownership, without having to integrate legacy systems. This could help markets move to T+0 settlement, where transactions are settled instantly. Firms that participate could see reduced counterparty risk, increased speed and cost savings, according to a DTCC white paper.
DTCC is open to bringing any blockchains its members like into this service, provided they survive a rigorous vetting process.
"If you're on Canton [Network], that means you value privacy above anything else," Chakar said. "There's use cases that are very specific to Canton. Clients that want to use Stellar may be looking for cheaper gas fees." Stellar charges a fraction of a fraction of a penny in usage fees (gas fees in crypto parlance) per transaction.
Customers that want privacy have to sacrifice speed, she noted.
"Our clients have got to understand which use case they're looking to advance, and we will work with them," Chakar said. "Our hypothesis is that many chains will be needed to run this, we don't believe there'll be one chain to rule them all." Most digital asset investors trade on many blockchains.
"A client on Monday may want their Apple stocks on Canton [Network], on Tuesday they might want [them] on Stellar and on Friday somewhere else," Chakar said. "We're very cognizant of our very privileged position as the sole depository in the U.S., so we're very careful not to pick winners or losers. At the end of the day, we're also accountable to myriad regulators in the United States and around the world."
Clare Adelgren, global blockchain leader at EY, gives the DTCC props for working with so many partners in the U.S. and around the world.
"There's a huge alignment between Euroclear, DTCC and Clearstream in the way that they're approaching this that I think has a lot of consistency," she said. "They really want involvement from the whole ecosystem."
How the DTCC got to this point
Daniela Barbosa, general manager of decentralized technologies at the Linux Foundation, noted that the DTCC has built up institutional knowledge about blockchain technology over the last 10 years.
"The DTCC has been experimenting, they've been building core capacity in-house, they've been working with some of the best vendors in the marketplace that have been working with blockchain and other types of decentralized technologies," she said. "Their decisions are made for building for the next 10 years, and the next 50 years, and next 100 years."
In 2023, DTCC acquired a company Chakar was running called Securrency.
"That was at the time a big, gutsy move from the newly appointed CEO Frank La Salla, the board, the management team taking a bet on where this world is going," said Chakar, who was formerly head of State Street Digital, global head of operations and data at Manulife and global head of ecommerce, strategy and research at BNY Mellon.
In November 2024, crypto-friendly regulators moved into the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities and Futures Exchange Commission.
"We knew that the path moving forward was going to be less onerous than the path we had navigated before," Chakar said. She and her team started to explore ways of helping DTCC move assets on chain.
In April 2025, DTCC rolled out a Collateral AppChain, which the organization refers to as a "shared infrastructure layer that can help firms move tokenized traditional assets and digital assets more efficiently ...The goal is to shift from holding collateral 'just in case' toward deploying it 'just in time,' improving capital efficiency while strengthening operational resilience," a DTCC white paper states.
"Collateral is the killer app chain for tokenization," Chakar said. It allows DTCC to move collateral at the speed of the network, she said. The DTCC is not providing collateral management. It is providing a shared digital blockchain-based infrastructure that the whole ecosystem can interact with and transact in a safe and neutral environment, she said.
If this technology had been available at the time of the 2008 mortgage crisis, "you could have found your assets there," Chakar said.
"I'm somebody who, in the term of my career, has managed collateral operations for a long period of time, and I promise you, we've spent millions of dollars on systems, on people, on infrastructure, and at the end of the day, the way we settle disputes is via email or phone," Chakar said. "In tomorrow's world, all those records are on blockchain. Your smart contracts are managing all the reconciliation, they're doing the asset servicing. The most heinous piece of collateral is when you have a piece of collateral on a loan, there's a corporate action that comes in, you've got to unwind it, bring it back in, substitute it, and then try to figure out who owns what piece of that corporate action. In tomorrow's world, smart contracts will manage all that."
Chakar's team spent the rest of 2025 working with regulators and partners. In December 2025, DTCC received a no-action letter from the SEC, in which it said its staff would not recommend enforcement action to the Commission against DTC in relation to its proposed tokenization services, for three years.
The DTCC began putting together an ecosystem of blockchains that includes Hyperledger Besu, which was used in the on-chain collateral effort, the private and permissioned Canton Network operated by Digital Asset and Stellar Network.
"There are not going to be thousands of chains in our ecosystem," Chakar said. "There will be a handful of chains, extremely well curated behind the scenes." When evaluating a blockchain, the DTCC looks for liquidity, safety and "that they're truly distributed," she said. An orchestration layer sits on top of these blockchains to ensure that assets can be moved back and forth safely.
DTCC's engineering team has been integrating DTCC's existing technology with these new chains, to give members the option to go either way.
There are data challenges. For instance, the DTCC would like to process corporate actions on-chain, and every chain has its own data configuration.
"Data is what makes all this work, and whether it's digital, whether it's AI, you've got to get good curation of data," Chakar said. The multiple layers on top of blockchains and the variety of forms of tokenization, such as direct, indirect or synthetic, are creating more fragmentation, she said.
DTCC has created new, digital books and records for the tokenization service, she said. "That allows us to be the aggregator of data and liquidity to our clients, so regardless of what chain you go on, regardless of what methodology you use to tokenize, you still need to know that when you started with 1,000 shares of something, you still have 1,000 shares, regardless of what format they are, because you can tokenize a token, and you can do this all day long," Chakar said. "It's really important that we can keep good track" of the tokens, she said.
For each token, the DTCC issues a digital twin that has the same CUSIP identification number as the original asset. The ability to convert from traditional to digital and back "could happen all day long, and that is really important, because you want an investor to be able to go to where the liquidity is," Chakar said.
The DTCC will be able to show investors all their positions in one place.
"We're uniquely positioned to be able to show you if you started your day with 1,000 shares of Apple, you still have 700 in traditional format, 300 in digital, and we're tracking that change of ownership by the minute, by the second, in quasi real time," Chakar said.
If an investor has money in a tokenized money market fund for a minute, an hour or a year, "we should be able to compute and credit the interest you're accruing on that, where you don't have to wait overnight for that to come through," she said. "That is super important."
DTCC recently partnered with Chainlink, a platform that acts as a bridge between isolated blockchain networks and real-world data, allowing smart contracts to exchange information and interact with external systems.
"They're going to be helping us stream real-time pricing into the app chain, which is something most traditional collateral entities don't do today," Chakar said.
"Our world used to be vertical silos," Chakar said. "You trade, and then you do things with your broker, and then you send the information to your custodian, who sends it to them. What we're seeing right now is all that is morphing into more of a lateral ecosystem, so it will take more than a DTCC. It will take more than whatever firm you can think of. It will truly take a village, and what we are advancing is the ability of building the shared ecosystem. I underscore 'shared' really carefully, because we're not looking to replace anybody, we're not looking to compete with anybody, and most importantly, we're not looking to replace the existing infrastructure, we're enhancing the new infrastructure with this new technology."
Monitoring and compliance
The DTCC has historically handled KYC, AML and sanctions-list compliance for securities transactions and it will continue to do so in the new tokenized network, Chakar said. Participants have a shared responsibility to do this for their own clients.
"The DTCC will continue to discharge its obligations in the digital world as we have in the traditional world, and the expectation would be that other financial institutions will do the same, and that's why our tokens are a little bit different from others," Chakar said.
The DTCC will require companies to register their digital wallets, "so we can make sure that the wallets are clean and they belong to good companies, and there's no funny business happening," Chakar said.
The organization has monitoring tools and reporting obligations that will extend to the tokenization service.
"One should be worried about the impact of the same stock running on multiple layer ones [in other words, foundational blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin] that does create friction and creates price discrepancies," Chakar said. "This is why you need a DTCC to be to be that aggregator and orchestrator of that data of that liquidity, and we're uniquely positioned because we don't compete, we're an enabler to all our participants, we're an enabler to this new generation of fintechs that are coming out. We've got responsibilities to ensure the safety and soundness of the U.S. markets, and we want to use the best tools we can get to implement that."
In October of this year, the DTCC will start to gradually go live and do real trades on its tokenization network, "so the market can get ready, the market can understand, because it will be a significant change to the front, middle and back office, and people need to get acclimated with it."
The DTCC will help if there's an incident such as a security breach or operations failure at a participant, Chakar said.
"I promise you, things will go wrong," she said. "They go wrong in today's world, and we step in and we fix them, and they will go wrong in the world of tomorrow, and that's why you need an ecosystem. We can orchestrate and we can monitor. We can't fix everything, we can't build everything, and this is why a safe selection of trusted partners is really important."
