The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation converted securities held at The Depository Trust Company into tokens and used them in live production trades on July 15, in what it called the largest tokenization initiative to date by breadth of use cases, asset classes and participants. The event marks a milestone ahead of the DTCC Tokenization Service's planned commercial launch in October 2026.
More than 30 firms took part, spanning traditional finance and digital-asset infrastructure: BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citadel Securities, Circle, CME Group, Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange, Vanguard, State Street Investment Management, BNP Paribas, Societe Generale, Broadridge, Digital Asset Holdings and others. Transactions were processed across seven use cases over several hours, including collateral pledges, securities lending, a US Treasury/repo delivery-versus-payment trade, equity DVP and DVD trades, an equity token transfer, and central counterparty margin workflows.
The digital conversions ran on two networks — the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust's Besu, which DTCC operates privately, and Canton, a public network built by Digital Asset. DTCC described this dual-network approach as part of a multi-chain strategy intended to give participants resiliency, scalability and choice of network.
The DTCC Tokenization Service lets DTC participants convert eligible book-entry securities into tokenized "digital twins" and move them to wallets of their choosing, while the underlying securities retain the same investor protections and entitlements as their traditional form. The service follows a No-Action Letter DTC received from the SEC seven months earlier, authorizing it to operate a tokenization service for the securities it custodies.
"DTCC demonstrated that we can apply the same institutional rigor to tokenization as we do for traditional assets while continuing to safeguard the integrity and resiliency of the global financial markets," said Frank La Salla, DTCC's President and CEO, in the announcement.
DTCC's Industry Working Group, which helped design the service, has grown to more than 100 members and partners. Full commercial production is targeted for October 2026, positioning DTCC — which processed $4.7 quadrillion in securities transactions in 2025 — as one of the highest-profile incumbents bringing tokenization into core market infrastructure.