The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation has begun moving tokenization from controlled experiments into production financial infrastructure. DTCC announced the latest milestone as participating firms started using tokenized versions of stocks, exchange-traded funds, and U.S. Treasury securities in real market workflows.
The initiative is operated through the Depository Trust Company, DTCC’s central securities depository subsidiary. DTC safeguards more than $114 trillion in assets, making the project materially different from smaller tokenization pilots that operate outside the infrastructure responsible for mainstream U.S. securities ownership and settlement.
Eligible assets can be converted into tokenized form while retaining the same economic interests, ownership protections, dividends, governance rights, and investor entitlements as their traditional counterparts. Participants can also convert the tokens back into conventional book-entry securities.
Production Trades Test Institutional Workflows
The initial activity includes collateral transfers, repo transactions, and equity trades involving selected securities. Assets identified for the rollout include U.S. Treasurys, Microsoft and Circle shares, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, the Invesco QQQ Trust, and an iShares short-term Treasury ETF.
Transactions can settle on approved blockchain infrastructure, including DTCC’s Hyperledger Besu environment and the Canton Network. The use of permissioned networks allows participating institutions to preserve identity controls, transaction privacy, compliance, and legal accountability while benefiting from programmable settlement.
The service is intended to support more flexible movement of assets and extend the operating window for financial markets. DTCC has separately moved major clearing functions toward a 24×5 schedule, creating a foundation for securities and collateral to move during most weekday hours rather than remaining tied to a narrow business-day cycle.
SEC Letter Reduces Regulatory Uncertainty
The project operates under a no-action letter issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The authorization allows DTC to provide a defined tokenization service for eligible participants and clients without facing enforcement action, provided the program remains within the specified conditions.
The initial scope covers highly liquid assets such as Russell 1000 shares, ETFs tracking major indexes, and U.S. Treasury bills, notes, and bonds. This limits early risk while giving the market a large pool of securities suitable for collateral, trading, and settlement applications. Nearly 40 firms are participating in the current production activity, with a broader industry working group involving more than 50 financial and technology companies. Participants include major banks, asset managers, exchanges, custody providers, and digital asset infrastructure firms.
DTCC plans a fuller service launch in October. At that stage, eligible participants are expected to gain a more standardized way to elect tokenized recordkeeping for securities already held at DTC, rather than moving assets into an unrelated wrapper or offshore structure. The distinction is important because many tokenized stocks available today merely track the price of an underlying security and may not provide voting, dividend, or direct ownership rights. DTC’s model creates a digital twin of an existing regulated asset while preserving its legal status.
If the service scales successfully, tokenization could improve collateral mobility, reduce reconciliation, support near-continuous settlement, and connect traditional assets with programmable financial systems. DTCC’s entry does not eliminate the operational and interoperability challenges facing tokenized markets, but it brings blockchain-based securities into the core infrastructure of Wall Street.
