DTCC Dominates Tokenization Market with Live Trades
The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has successfully processed its first live production trades of tokenized stocks, exchange-traded funds, and US Treasuries. This milestone marks a significant shift in the way securities are traded and settled.
The trades were processed on July 15, under an SEC no-action letter authorizing a three-year pilot. The pilot covers constituents of the Russell 1000, major index exchange-traded funds, and US Treasuries. More than forty firms participated in the pilot, including BlackRock, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Vanguard, NYSE, Nasdaq, CME Group, and State Street.
The tokenized versions of these securities preserve identical legal ownership rights to the underlying securities, resolving a question that has hung over every tokenized equity product to date. This means that the token is the security, held through the same depository chain, and not a claim on someone's promise to hold the security for you.
The scale of DTCC's operations is staggering, with the company custodies more than $114 trillion in securities and processed roughly $4.7 quadrillion in transactions last year. In contrast, the crypto-native tokenized equity market currently amounts to something in the region of a billion dollars in total.