The Depository Trust Company (DTC), a subsidiary of DTCC, activated its Tokenization Service on October 28, 2026, making 34 securities representing approximately $30 trillion in market value available as digital tokens across the Canton Network and a private Besu environment. Twenty firms — inclu...
"Today marks the culmination of years of work to bring tokenized securities into a regulated framework supported by trusted market infrastructure." — Frank La Salla, President and CEO, DTCC
The Depository Trust Company (DTC), a subsidiary of DTCC, activated its Tokenization Service on October 28, 2026, making 34 securities representing approximately $30 trillion in market value available as digital tokens across the Canton Network and a private Besu environment. Twenty firms — including JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Investments, and Citadel Securities — signed participation agreements at launch. DTC custodies more than $114 trillion in assets. The 34 eligible instruments at launch represent roughly 26% of that base.
The service operates under a three-year SEC no-action letter issued December 11, 2025, covering Russell 1000 constituents, major index ETFs, and U.S. Treasury bills, notes, and bonds. DTCC has stated its long-term ambition is to make all 1.4 million CUSIPs in DTC custody digitally eligible. The gap between 34 securities today and 1.4 million CUSIPs in the pipeline defines the next phase of institutional tokenization infrastructure.
On October 28, DTC switched on a service that mints tokenized representations of securities already held in its custody. The initial batch covers:
These 34 instruments carry a combined market value of approximately $30 trillion, according to DTCC. The tokens preserve the original CUSIP, ownership rights, and investor protections attached to the underlying securities. Authorized participants can convert between traditional book-entry and tokenized forms and transfer tokens to registered wallets around the clock.
The service runs on two blockchain networks at launch: the Canton Network, a privacy-enabled permissioned chain built by Digital Asset Holdings, and DTCC's private Hyperledger Besu environment. Additional networks are planned for 2027.
Twenty firms signed participation agreements for the October launch. The confirmed roster includes:
| Category | Firms | |---|---| | Global Investment Banks | JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, BNP Paribas, UBS | | Market Makers / Prop Trading | Citadel Securities, DRW, Virtu | | Asset Management / Custody | Fidelity Investments, State Street | | Clearing / Execution | Apex Clearing, Clear Street, DriveWealth, Alpaca, Velocity Capital, Edward Jones |
The ecosystem also includes technology and infrastructure collaborators: BitGo Bank & Trust, Blockdaemon, Broadridge, DFNS, Fireblocks, HIFI, Kaleido, Matter Labs, Ondo Finance, Prometheum Capital, Talos, Taurus, Tradeweb, and Transcend. These partners provide wallet infrastructure, custody, trading connectivity, and DeFi interoperability layers.
Brian Steele, Managing Director and President of Clearing & Securities Services at DTCC, stated that more than 150 firms participated in the Industry Working Group that shaped the service's design.
The service is built on the ComposerX platform, DTCC's institutional tokenization engine. ComposerX uses a "digital wrapper" architecture that layers distributed ledger functionality directly onto DTC's existing centralized book-entry system without modifying the underlying physical asset custody infrastructure.
The key technical components:
This architecture is significant because it avoids the "rip and replace" approach that characterized earlier tokenization experiments. DTCC is extending its existing monopoly position in U.S. securities settlement — it clears virtually all U.S. equities trades — into the digital asset layer.
DTCC selected Canton Network as its primary blockchain layer, a decision that has drawn scrutiny. Canton is built by Digital Asset Holdings, which raised $135 million in June 2025 (backed by Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, and DTCC itself), followed by $50 million in December 2025 from BNY Mellon, Nasdaq, and S&P Global. The company is reportedly closing a $300 million round at a $2 billion valuation led by a16z crypto.
Canton's design reflects institutional priorities:
The choice of Canton over public chains or other enterprise blockchains positions Digital Asset Holdings as a critical infrastructure provider for what could become the default tokenization layer for U.S. capital markets.
Grayscale has filed an S-1 registration with the SEC for a Canton ETF, suggesting that some market participants expect the Canton ecosystem to generate investable value.
Before the October full launch, DTCC executed limited production trades on July 15, 2026, involving more than 30 firms. The pilot covered multiple use cases:
Participants in the July pilot included Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, BlackRock, Citadel Securities, Nasdaq, NYSE Group, Vanguard, and Circle.
The weekend repo transaction is particularly notable. The global repo market trades approximately $12 trillion per day, according to the International Capital Market Association. Extending repo activity to 24/7 through tokenization addresses a genuine operational constraint: collateral currently sits idle during weekends and holidays.
The SEC's Division of Trading and Markets issued DTC a no-action letter on December 11, 2025, authorizing the tokenization service for a three-year pilot period. The letter covers:
The no-action letter is not a permanent regulatory framework. It provides a time-limited sandbox within which DTC can operate the service without enforcement action, provided it meets the conditions specified. The three-year window — running through approximately December 2028 — creates a testing period after which the SEC will presumably evaluate whether permanent rule-making is warranted.
This structure means DTCC's tokenization service carries regulatory risk. If the SEC declines to extend or formalize the authorization, or if the political environment shifts, the service could face curtailment.
As of October 2026, tokenized real-world assets (excluding stablecoins) reached approximately $39 billion in on-chain value, according to industry trackers. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries alone account for roughly $10 billion of that total, with BlackRock's BUIDL fund holding approximately $2.2 billion and Franklin Templeton's FOBXX at $668 million as of September 30, 2026.
DTCC's entry changes the competitive landscape. Prior tokenization efforts — by BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Ondo Finance, and others — typically involved creating new, natively digital instruments. DTCC's approach is different: it tokenizes securities that already exist within the traditional settlement infrastructure, preserving the existing custody chain while adding a digital access layer.
The $30 trillion in eligible securities at launch dwarfs the entire existing RWA tokenization market by a factor of roughly 770x. However, eligible does not mean tokenized. The actual volume of tokenized activity through the DTCC service at launch has not been disclosed. The gap between what is eligible and what is actively tokenized will be the metric to watch.
The selection of Canton Network drew criticism from segments of the blockchain developer community. Cyprien Grau, lead of Status Network, argued that Canton "positioned itself as a public, decentralized chain but operated through super validators that required vetting and approval," creating what he described as "a fully permissioned DAG with no globally verifiable state."
Grau also noted that Canton rejected zero-knowledge proofs in favor of data sharding with access control lists — "privacy by fragmentation and gated access instead of cryptography."
Canton's documentation acknowledges these design choices as deliberate, framing privacy and regulatory compliance as features for institutional finance rather than limitations.
The criticism raises a legitimate architectural question: does DTCC's tokenization service represent genuine blockchain adoption, or does it replicate the existing permissioned, centralized structure of traditional finance with blockchain branding? The answer depends partly on whether additional public or semi-public networks are added in 2027, and whether interoperability with DeFi protocols materializes beyond ecosystem partner integrations.
DTCC has published six expansion areas for 2027 and beyond:
DTCC has also stated its ultimate ambition: making all 1.4 million CUSIPs in DTC custody digitally eligible. No timeline has been given for that milestone.
DTCC's tokenization launch represents the entry of U.S. securities settlement infrastructure — the entity that clears virtually all U.S. equities trades — into blockchain-based markets. The scale of DTC's custody base ($114 trillion), the participant roster (20 of Wall Street's largest firms), and the regulatory authorization (SEC no-action letter) separate this from prior tokenization experiments.
The economic question is whether tokenization generates new revenue or merely adds a digital access layer to existing fee structures. DTCC's initial focus on collateral optimization and 24/7 repo suggests the first revenue use case will be unlocking value from idle assets outside market hours — a concrete, measurable benefit rather than a speculative one.
The architecture choice — extending centralized custody with a permissioned chain rather than migrating to public infrastructure — ensures DTCC retains its structural position in U.S. capital markets. Whether this constitutes meaningful decentralization or simply digital plumbing with blockchain labels remains an open debate. The answer will depend on how the 2027 roadmap executes, particularly whether public network integrations and DeFi interoperability materialize.
Thirty-four securities are tokenized today. 1.4 million CUSIPs sit in the pipeline. The distance between those two numbers is the story for the next three years.