For decades, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has operated as the financial system’s invisible backbone — the institution that processes virtually every securities trade in the United States, sitting between buyer and seller in near-total anonymity.
On Monday, it stepped into the open with something that Wall Street has been debating for years: a concrete timeline to put real assets on a blockchain. DTCC announced today it will begin live, limited trades of tokenized securities in July 2026, with a full commercial launch of the service set for October.
The service lives inside its subsidiary, the Depository Trust Company, which currently holds more than $114 trillion in custodied assets — a number that gives some scale to what is at stake.
What is tokenization?
Tokenization is the process of creating a digital representation of an existing asset — a stock, a Treasury bond, an ETF — on a blockchain. In DTCC’s design, the underlying asset stays in DTC’s custody and retains all its existing legal protections, ownership rights, and entitlements.
What changes is the form: a holder would have a token that mirrors the real thing, one that can move across digital networks in ways that paper-based or legacy-electronic systems cannot.
DTCC is not issuing new assets or creating speculative instruments. It is taking things that already exist — Russell 1000 stocks, major index ETFs, U.S. Treasury bills and notes — and making digital versions of them available to its participants.
The SEC gave regulatory cover for this in December 2025, issuing a no-action letter that authorized the service for a defined asset set over a three-year window.
More than 50 firms have shaped the service through DTCC’s Industry Working Group, and the roster reflects the breadth of the ambition. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, and Wells Fargo sit alongside Anchorage Digital, Circle, Ondo Finance, Fireblocks, and Kraken’s parent company Payward.
Crypto native firms are sneaking into Wall Street via DTCC
The presence of both traditional custodians and crypto-native infrastructure firms is not incidental — it signals that DTCC is building something meant to bridge two worlds that have operated in parallel, with mutual suspicion, for years.
The real-world asset tokenization market currently stands at roughly $25 billion, with bonds accounting for the largest share at over $15 billion, followed by precious metals at $5.6 billion and private credit at $2.6 billion.
Public equities add $838 million. The market has grown from a base in 2022 but remains small relative to the trillions in traditional securities that could theoretically be represented digitally.
DTCC is not alone in the race. Nasdaq is building a framework for blockchain-based share issuance and has partnered with Kraken for distribution. Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, has backed tokenized stock plans through a deal with crypto platform OKX.
The collective pressure from these institutions has begun to look less like experimentation and more like a structural shift.
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