The American market’s settlement layer took a measurable step toward tokenized securities on October 28, 2026. The Depository Trust Company, the central securities depository that keeps the official book for most U.S. equities and Treasury securities, switched on its Tokenization Service, making a first cohort of 34 securities available to be represented as digital tokens that move between registered wallets.
This is not a crypto exchange listing. DTC sits behind the trade: when an investor buys a stock, the shares are usually held in street name at DTC, which records ownership and moves the security on the buyer’s behalf. The new service lets DTC participants convert those book-entry positions into tokenized twins that carry the same identifier, ownership rights and investor protections as the underlying security, with each token backed one-to-one by a security held at DTC.
The numbers that frame the switch
Two figures put the launch in scale. DTC holds more than $114 trillion in assets under custody. The 34 securities made eligible on day one — large-cap Russell 1000 names, a set of exchange-traded funds, and U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds — represent roughly $30 trillion in market value, or about a quarter of the custody base.
Twenty DTC participants have signed agreements to use the service, including Bank of America, Barclays, Citi, Fidelity Investments, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, State Street and UBS. Around the core participants sits a wider collaborator group of wallet providers, technology firms and trading venues. The list reaches well beyond banks, spanning custody technology firms and venues that will handle connectivity and on-chain reference data as the service scales. The service is live on two networks: the Canton Network and DTCC’s own private Besu network, with additional networks planned for 2027.
What the service does and does not do
Within a single network, transfers between DTC-registered wallets can happen around the clock, and DTCC says participants can mobilize collateral within minutes. Conversion back to conventional book-entry form is a separate step, and DTC’s own books remain the official record: the token is a representation of the position, not a replacement for it.
The launch is real but staged. BNY and Goldman Sachs, which took part in earlier trial trades, are not among the twenty announced signatories, a reminder that adoption is being sequenced rather than immediate.
How the industry got here
The path was measured. In December 2025, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued a no-action letter authorizing DTC to tokenize Russell 1000 constituents, major-index ETFs, and U.S. Treasury securities. In July 2026, DTCC and more than thirty firms completed initial limited-production trades. The October launch delivers that promise rather than announcing it, under an authorization that runs for a three-year period.
What to watch next is not another headline but whether the twenty participants route meaningful volume through tokenized form, and whether on-chain cash settlement — which would let a tokenized trade settle end to end without touching conventional rails — moves from the operator’s roadmap to a working date. Those are the markers that will separate a foundational switch-on from a milestone adopted only on paper.
Source: BlockchainReporter.