DTCC launches tokenized securities service with 20 Wall Street firms

DTCC clears most US stock trades. Now it is turning them into blockchain tokens. The company switched on its Tokenization Service on October 28, with 20 firms signed up, among them JPMorgan, Citi and Morgan Stanley. The pipes under American markets are moving on-chain.

Behind the shorthand sits the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, the quiet utility that settles the bulk of US securities trades. Its depository unit, the Depository Trust Company, or DTC, holds more than $114 trillion in securities for the market and cleared transactions worth $4.7 quadrillion in 2025, by the firm's own count. DTCC is not a bank or an exchange. It is the back-office utility most people never see, owned by the banks and brokers whose trades it clears. When a body that large starts tokenizing, the rest of Wall Street pays attention.

What DTCC switched on

A tokenized security is a copy that lives on a blockchain while the original stays put. DTC calls them digital twins. The real share or Treasury note sits where it always has, inside DTC, and the token stands in for it on-chain. Picture a coat-check ticket. The coat does not move. The ticket does, and whoever holds it has a claim on the coat.

For now the service runs on two networks, the Canton Network and a private chain DTCC built using Besu. Eligible firms can convert their holdings between traditional and tokenized form during business hours, then send the tokens to digital wallets of their choosing. DTCC says collateral can be mobilized within minutes rather than the hours or days a manual transfer can take today. Movement runs around the clock, not only when the market is open.

Speed is the selling point. Normal US stock trades settle one business day after they are struck, and the securities themselves sit still inside DTC between buyer and seller. A tokenized version can move between approved wallets at any hour, weekends included. For a bank that has to post collateral against a position late on a Friday, minutes instead of waiting for Monday is the pitch. Whether that pitch pays off is a question the next year will answer, not this one.

DTCC framed the day as a turning point. "Today marks the culmination of years of work to bring tokenized securities into a regulated framework," said Frank La Salla, the company's president and chief executive. Nadine Chakar, global head of DTCC Digital Assets, went further, calling it "only the beginning of DTCC's ultimate goal to build the Web3 ecosystem of the future."

Who signed up, and what they can do

Twenty DTC participants have signed agreements so far. The roster runs across Wall Street and past it: Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citadel Securities, Citi, Fidelity Investments, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, State Street and UBS among them. More will join on a rolling basis, DTCC said. JPMorgan, one of those firms, had already moved its own deposit token onto the Ethereum mainnet earlier in 2026.

What those firms can do today is narrow. They can turn eligible holdings into tokens and move them at any hour, within compliance limits. What they cannot do yet is settle a trade with on-chain cash or post the tokens as collateral inside DTCC's own risk system. Those pieces are slated for 2027, CoinDesk reported. Until then a firm has to turn a token back into ordinary book-entry form to meet a margin call. "The industry is ready to move beyond experimentation," said Brian Steele, DTCC's president of clearing and securities services.

The rules that made it legal

None of this would fly without a nod from regulators. In December 2025 the SEC gave DTC a no-action letter, a signal that staff would not recommend enforcement, covering three asset types: members of the Russell 1000 stock index, ETFs that track major indexes, and US Treasury bills, notes and bonds. A DTCC spokesperson put the market value of the eligible pool near $30 trillion, CoinDesk reported on October 28. The launch did not come from nowhere. DTCC said in May that more than 50 firms were building toward the service, ran limited production trades in July with over 30 of them, and set October as the go-live date it has now hit.

This is not DeFi. The official record of who owns what still sits with DTC, not on a public chain, and the tokens are permissioned, closed to anyone without a seat at the table. DTCC also drew a hard line between these digital twins and synthetic stock tokens, the kind that track a price without granting real ownership. One confers the share. The other only mirrors it. That distinction is the whole point of routing this through a regulated depository.

The catch

A regulated wrapper does not erase risk. The International Monetary Fund found this year that tokenized stocks traded about 1.5 times more volatile than the shares behind them, a gap worth holding in mind before treating a token as identical to the asset it copies. The service is also young. DTCC did not say how many of the 20 firms have minted a token yet, or how much value has actually moved. The headline capability, settling fully on-chain, is still switched off.

Critics of institutional tokenization make a plain point. Moving a share onto a blockchain does not change who controls it. DTC still keeps the master record, the same firms still clear the trades, and a token only works inside a closed group of approved members. The technology is new. The gatekeepers are not. The promise is cheaper, faster post-trade plumbing, and that promise rests on capabilities DTCC has not turned on.

What to watch

The bigger shift is still a roadmap. DTCC plans to add more blockchain networks in 2027, along with tools to settle trades in digital cash and to use tokenized securities as collateral. CoinDesk reported the new networks would include Stellar and Circle's Arc chain. Citi has projected the wider tokenized-securities market could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030, a number that assumes a lot goes right first.

A fight is already brewing over where tokenized stocks should live. On November 2 the broker StoneX told clients that DTCC's launch validates rather than threatens Securitize, a rival that tokenizes shares on public chains like Solana. Analyst Mark Palmer wrote that DTCC had "opened a debate about where tokenized U.S. equities should ultimately be anchored." The same day Securitize widened its own tokenized US stock lineup to 25 names, adding ExxonMobil, GameStop, Salesforce and Disney. Securitize's listed shares, ticker SECZ, traded near $7.30 on November 2, down about a quarter from their July 2025 debut, The Block reported, while tokenized private credit on Solana has grown to $1.44 billion. Permissioned rails or open ones. That is the question worth watching.