Giants Move Into Tokenization:

DTCC and Clearstream

Over the past year, tokenization has taken center stage on any conversation about global market infrastructure. The latest signal, a gigantic one, came on December 11, 2025, when DTCC announced that its depository subsidiary, The Depository Trust Company (DTC), received a No-Action Letter from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, authorizing a regulated tokenization service for assets held at DTC. But this development is actually truly groundbreaking because it comes shortly after a similar move in Europe. Clearstream, the post-trade giant of the Deutsche Börse Group and one of the world’s largest international central securities depositories, recently launched its own tokenization platform—Clearstream D7—marking a combined collosal step. 

Together, DTCC and Clearstream oversee the custody, clearing or settlement of tens of trillions of dollars of securities across geographies. Given their combined scale, their entry into the tokenization space might be regarded as the first meaningful step towards "the tokenization of everything", which some of the top leaders in the financial industry have been touting.

This is the first time that the main post-trade engines of the U.S. and Europe have begun to adopt on-chain technology as part of their core service models. A shift that furthers the positioning of tokenization as an infrastructure-level global phenomenon.

DTCC’s model allows a security to fluidly shift between book-entry form and tokenized form, which in turn makes it possible to deploy Treasuries or equities as instantly mobilizable collateral or to integrate them into automated, programmable workflows. Clearstream’s D7 initiative similarly aims at transforming the issuance and lifecycle management process into one that can operate with greater speed, fewer intermediaries, and event-driven logic. In both cases, tokenization is being embedded where settlement, risk, compliance and data integrity are already governed.

DTCC’s authorization enables the issuance o tokenized representations of some of the most liquid securities in the world, such as Russell 1000 equities, major index ETFs and U.S. Treasuries—with the same CUSIPs (US equivalent to ISINs), the same rights and the same investor protections as their traditional book-entry equivalents. Market participants will be able to convert between traditional and tokenized formats seamlessly, while the tokens themselves incorporate compliance and control functions that regulators expect, including minting, burning, freezing and clawback capabilities. The rollout is expected in the second half of 2026.

On this side of the pond, Clearstream’s D7 digital securities platform has been progressively rolled out as a central piece of Deutsche Börse’s digital strategy. D7 supports the creation, issuance, safekeeping and lifecycle management of digital and tokenized securities within the traditional regulatory perimeter. Clearstream has positioned D7 as a path to fully digital issuance and instant processing, with the long-term ambition of enabling programmable securities that interact natively with smart-contract-based settlement or collateral flows.

Tokenization’s strongest value propositions—real-time settlement, more agile collateral mobility, automation through smart contracts, and 24/7 availability—realize their true potential when they exist inside the official market infrastructure at scale, a process than in 2025 has gained the type of momentum we expected would come.

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