DTCC Runs First Live Tokenized Trades of Stocks and Treasuries With Wall Street's Biggest Firms

The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which clears and settles most United States securities trades, moved tokenized securities into live production on July 15. It ran its first real trades of tokenized stocks, exchange-traded funds and Treasuries with more than 30 institutions, among them BlackRock, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Vanguard, CME Group, Nasdaq and State Street.

The initial batch of assets included Microsoft shares, the Invesco QQQ Trust, the SPDR S&P 500 exchange-traded fund and short-dated Treasuries, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. In one transaction JPMorgan tokenized its holding of the QQQ fund and used the token to satisfy a margin requirement at CME Group. Some trades settled on Hyperledger Besu and others on the Canton Network, both permissioned ledgers built for regulated markets rather than public chains. DTCC has said its full tokenization service is scheduled to go live in October.

The distinction matters. These trades ran on closed, institution-only ledgers, not on the public networks where tokenized equities from firms such as Robinhood and Securitize have begun to appear. The contest is now explicit: whether the assets that back trillions of dollars in traditional finance migrate onto open, composable blockchains or onto closed networks the incumbents control. Robinhood's own layer-2 network posted the fastest weekly growth of any tracked network, with total value secured up 44.5 percent to $616 million, per L2Beat data, a sign that the open-venue approach is also advancing.