The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation announced Monday it will support initial, limited production trades of tokenized real-world assets in July, with a full service launch set for October 2026. The announcement, published on DTCC's website , marks the most concrete timeline the firm has yet disclosed for a project that has been building quietly for over a year.
DTCC's DTC division currently custodies more than $114 trillion in assets, giving the scale of this initiative few precedents in the history of financial infrastructure. Under the service's first phase, DTC will offer an alternative means by which it may represent and record ownership of securities held via the indirect holding model, without changing the relationship between DTC, its participants, the issuer, or the beneficial owner. In short, the underlying assets stay put and retain their existing legal protections – what changes is their digital representation.
The service will cover a defined set of highly liquid assets, including Russell 1000 constituents, ETFs tracking major indices, and U.S. Treasury bills, bonds, and notes, DTCC said.
The system is being shaped with input from more than 50 firms, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and crypto-native companies like Anchorage and Circle. The full working group also spans Nasdaq, Ripple Prime, Bank of America, Citi, Charles Schwab, and Morgan Stanley.
The regulatory groundwork was laid in December. The SEC issued a no-action letter in December 2025 authorising the service for a defined asset set over a three-year window.
"Tokenization is an important and critical step toward building tomorrow's digital infrastructure," said Nadine Chakar, DTCC's managing director and global head of digital assets. "DTCC is committed to remaining at the forefront of innovation and championing a scalable, interoperable and risk-managed Web3 ecosystem that harnesses the power of digital ledger technology and delivers real value to the industry."
The move follows broader Wall Street adoption of tokenization, with NYSE partnering with Securitize for tokenized securities and Computershare tapping the same firm to tokenize thousands of company stocks. The DTCC initiative is, however, distinct in scale: it operates at the level of core post-trade infrastructure, rather than as an issuer-level service.
