Wall Street’s clearinghouse seeks ‘high-performance’ blockchains to tokenize corporate actions
Wall Road’s clearinghouse is working with blockchain builders to convey certainly one of capital market’s least glamorous however most operationally complicated capabilities onchain: company actions.
Frank La Salla, CEO of the Depository Belief and Clearing Company (DTCC), mentioned Wednesday at Consensus 2026 in Miami that the market infrastructure large is collaborating with a number of layer-1 (L1) blockchain networks to enhance how dividend funds, tender affords and different post-trade occasions might be processed in tokenized markets.
“We’re working with some excellent L1s proper now, who’re targeted on the power to course of at quicker charges, have larger resiliency,” he mentioned.
Presently, the bottleneck is that on most blockchain networks may take a number of days to course of company actions, he identified.
“We course of tens of millions of dividend funds a day to feed to the business,” Le Salla mentioned. “We want high-performance L1s to do this.”
DTCC sits on the heart of U.S. capital markets infrastructure, processing roughly $20 trillion in Treasury and company securities trades every day. The clearinghouse has spent practically a decade exploring blockchain functions, however La Salla mentioned the expertise solely grew to become commercially significant as soon as real-world use instances started to emerge within the pst few years.
Just lately, the agency accelerated its push to modernize market infrastructure with tokenization and blockchain tech. This week, DTCC introduced to start testing its tokenized securities platform in July forward of a broader rollout in October.
La Salla mentioned collateral motion could grow to be blockchain’s first large-scale institutional use case. Tokenized collateral may enable corporations outdoors U.S. market hours to entry liquidity in actual time with out counting on legacy settlement home windows. He described a state of affairs the place corporations in Asia may entry U.S. greenback on a Sunday in New York by posting tokenized collateral onchain in real-time.
“That’s extremely highly effective,” La Salla mentioned.
However he cautioned that blockchain programs nonetheless face main hurdles round scalability, liquidity fragmentation and danger administration.
One problem, for instance, is netting transactions. Conventional market infrastructure compresses huge buying and selling exercise into smaller settlement obligations, decreasing capital necessities throughout the system.
“Blockchain is decentralized,” La Salla mentioned. “Lots of the efficiencies that we get in our business are via focus of liquidity.”
