Wall Road’s clearinghouse is working with blockchain builders to carry one in every 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), stated Wednesday at Consensus 2026 in Miami that the market infrastructure big is collaborating with a number of layer-1 (L1) blockchain networks to enhance how dividend funds, tender gives and different post-trade occasions may very well be processed in tokenized markets.
“We’re working with some superb L1s proper now, who’re centered on the power to course of at sooner charges, have greater resiliency,” he stated.
Presently, the bottleneck is that on most blockchain networks may take just a few days to course of company actions, he identified.
“We course of thousands and thousands of dividend funds a day to feed to the trade,” Le Salla stated. “We want high-performance L1s to do this.”
DTCC sits on the middle of U.S. capital markets infrastructure, processing roughly $20 trillion in Treasury and company securities trades every day. The clearinghouse has spent almost a decade exploring blockchain functions, however La Salla stated 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 stated collateral motion might grow to be blockchain’s first large-scale institutional use case. Tokenized collateral may enable corporations exterior U.S. market hours to entry liquidity in actual time with out counting on legacy settlement home windows. He described a situation 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 stated.
However he cautioned that blockchain methods 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, lowering capital necessities throughout the system.
“Blockchain is decentralized,” La Salla stated. “Most of the efficiencies that we get in our trade are by focus of liquidity.”
