DTCC's Tom Pikett: tokenization service makes $30 trillion eligible to go onchain

DTCC's tokenization service goes live with 34 assets, unlocking a $30 trillion opportunity

Tom Pikett, Executive Director at DTCC Digital Assets, describes the newly launched tokenization service as covering 34 securities spanning equities, ETFs and US Treasuries, built under the no-action letter DTCC received last year. He says that breadth of asset classes is what unlocks "in the region of about 30 trillion" in assets that could eventually come onchain. The service connects to Canton Network and Hyperledger Besu, DTCC's internal ledger, with Stellar and Circle's Arc also mentioned as destinations.

Pikett frames the token itself as secondary to the real goal: collateral mobility.

"The fact is that the token itself is not the product, right?"

He argues that global institutions face a problem where assets sit idle when their home markets are closed, forcing firms to source cash or collateral elsewhere, and that making those assets usable across time zones carries material balance sheet and intraday liquidity benefits, which he says DTCC quantified in a recent paper as "a big number."

Tokenized money market funds and the collateral app chain arriving next year

Pikett highlights tokenized money market funds as a case where tokenization changes existing plumbing: today, meeting a margin call often means redeeming a money market fund for cash, whereas a tokenized fund could be delivered directly as collateral. He points to a one-day production test DTCC ran in July, where a prime broker/FCM delivered margin to CME using DTC tokens, as an early proof point for this collateral-on-chain model.

The next major milestone, he says, is the collateral app chain going live in the first half of next year, which he expects to create a "flywheel" for using these tokenized assets. He also describes the market's current collateral posture as "just-in-case" — firms pre-position assets to cover closed markets — versus the "just-in-time" model tokenization could enable, freeing up previously idle collateral to generate revenue elsewhere.

Chainlink partnership, netting versus atomic settlement, and what comes next

Pikett details DTCC's use of Chainlink's CRE product, announced in May, to bring off-chain pricing data onto DTCC's smart contracts, since collateral decisions today are made off-chain before a token simply moves wallets. He also references a Sibos demonstration using Chainlink's Polkadot product in a sandbox environment, where collateral was blocked on DTCC's collateral app chain to release an asset on a separate chain, including mainnet Ethereum in testing.

On the bigger question of how much settlement ultimately moves onchain, Pikett notes DTCC nets down 98% of trades it sees, raising doubt about whether full atomic, gross-basis settlement makes sense everywhere — though he suggests intraday repo could be a candidate for atomic settlement. He names securities lending and CCP collateral acceptance as areas of emerging interest, and says the biggest remaining challenge for client firms is operational: understanding how to view and mobilize assets held both traditionally and onchain within their own systems.