The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) switched on its Tokenization Service on Oct. 28, moving Russell 1000 stocks, major index ETFs and US Treasuries onto a blockchain. 20 banks and brokers signed up for day-one access, including Morgan Stanley.
The list also includes Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, J.P. Morgan, State Street, UBS, Fidelity Investments and Citadel Securities. DTCC holds $114 trillion in securities, and more than 150 firms took part in the industry working group that built the service.
DTCC President and CEO Frank La Salla said the launch “marks the culmination of years of work to bring tokenized securities into a regulated framework.” Nadine Chakar, DTCC's global head of digital assets, called it “only the beginning” of the company's push to build out Web3 infrastructure.
Amy Oldenburg, who runs digital asset strategy at Morgan Stanley, said “the hands-on experience of integrating tokenized securities with established market infrastructure will inform the continued development of the firm's digital asset capabilities as the market evolves.”
The bank now aims to support tokenized stock trading on its alternative trading system in the first quarter of 2027, pushed back from a prior target of the second half of 2026.
The service runs on the Canton blockchain and a private network DTCC built using Besu technology. Tokenized securities carry the same ownership claims and investor safeguards as their traditional counterparts and can be swapped back and forth between the two forms.
The launch followed a letter the Securities and Exchange Commission gave DTCC in December 2025, promising not to pursue enforcement over the setup, a type of document known in the US as a no-action letter. DTCC had already run live trades of tokenized securities back in July 2026.
