Today the DTCC launched its Tokenization Service after the SEC granted a no-action letter in December 2025. At launch just 34 securities are eligible, a mix of equities, Treasuries and ETFs. The SEC’s no-action letter covers a far broader set, the full Russell 1000, US Treasuries and major index ETFs, worth roughly $30 trillion of the more than $114 trillion DTC holds in custody. These are tokenized entitlements that carry the same ownership rights as conventional securities held in street name at DTC and share the same CUSIP.
A key goal is 24/7 transfers. When a tokenized position moves between registered wallets, that is the settlement, so there is no T+1 wait. However, there are limits in the early period. Moving a token between chains goes through DTC’s conversion service, which runs from 2am to 6pm ET on business days, so round the clock transfers are intrachain only. The same service converts positions between conventional and tokenized form. Transfers can only be made between registered wallets. DTC Participants can register selected third party wallets for their clients via a user interface.
Twenty DTC Participants have signed up so far. They include global banks and custodians such as JP Morgan, Citi, Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, UBS, Morgan Stanley and State Street, retail and clearing brokers including Fidelity, Edward Jones, Apex, DriveWealth and Clear Street, and crypto adjacent firms Alpaca and Velocity Capital. Notable absences are BNY, the largest custodian, and Goldman Sachs, which took part in the July live trials. Future users will be onboarded on a rolling basis.
There’s a misconception that tokenization is only happening on the Canton Network. DTC’s Besu-based private distributed ledger is also available at launch and provides the foundation for the DTCC Collateral AppChain due early next year. By then additional networks such as Stellar and Circle’s Arc are expected to join the fray, as well as other blockchains subject to client demand.
Settlement and applications
The roadmap for 2027 and beyond includes expanding the eligible securities and asset servicing. For now settlement arrangements are up to Participants, but given the DTCC group’s critical role in securities settlement it is not surprising that it has plans in this area. Today netting via the NSCC typically reduces the settlement figure for conventional securities by around 98%, and the roadmap includes on-chain cash netting. The DTCC has previously told Ledger Insights it is exploring stablecoins and tokenized deposits for settlement. While not necessarily indicative, JPMorgan played a prominent role in the July live transactions and has said it plans to launch JPM Coin on Canton. Previous DTCC collateral simulations included Société Générale FORGE’s stablecoins and Fnality’s institutional settlement system.
It remains to be seen whether use cases will bifurcate, with traditional finance attracted to 24/7 movement of collateral and crypto natives using DTC tokens to trade or to underpin wrapped tokens. Alpaca is among the launch participants and Ondo is named as a collaborator, which points toward wrapped tokens. Trading could happen via ATS venues or tokenized securities venues that are subject to the SEC’s innovation exemption. Canton may not be known as a major DeFi trading venue, but one of the first TSVs planning to launch, TSV LLC, is on the Canton Network. That said, it only plans to support issuer-sponsored tokens rather than third party tokens such as the DTCC’s.
