Morgan Stanley among first banks to tokenize US equities, Treasurys through DTCC’s service

DTCC clears and settles the vast majority of US equity trades and has run blockchain pilots since at least 2021, including Project Ion for repo settlement. Those stayed experimental; this is the first time stocks, ETFs and Treasuries held at DTC move into live tokenized form for market use, putting DTCC alongside Franklin Templeton's BENJI and BlackRock's BUIDL in the race to put traditional securities on-chain rather than just stablecoins or crypto-native assets.

Keeping custody at DTC and transfers walled inside two permissioned ledgers delivers speed without the open composability that tokenization advocates have promised for years. It is a practical compromise for a systemically important clearinghouse, but it also means these tokens cannot yet move to outside wallets or interoperate with public chains, leaving the harder question of interoperability between Canton, Besu and the broader tokenized-asset market unresolved.

DTCC and its bank partners are explicitly building toward tokenized equity-trading infrastructure targeted for 2027, and that timeline is the real test of whether this service stays a custody-side experiment or becomes the plumbing for actual trading. Watch whether more of DTCC's roughly 20 launch participants extend tokenization from Treasuries into equities trading itself, and whether the 2027 target holds.