Wall Street clearinghouses are collaborating with blockchain developers to move one of the least visible but most operationally complex functions in capital markets—corporate actions—onto the blockchain.
Frank La Salla, CEO of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), said Wednesday at Consensus 2026 in Miami that the market infrastructure giant is collaborating with multiple Layer 1 (L1) blockchain networks to improve the handling of dividend payments, tender offers, and other post-trade events in tokenized markets.
He said, "We are currently working with some outstanding L1 security experts who are focused on improving processing speed and enhancing risk resistance."
He pointed out that the current bottleneck is that most blockchain networks may take several days to process corporate actions.
Lesaara said: "We process millions of dividend payments daily for industry use. We need a high-performance L1 processor to accomplish this."
DTCC is at the core of the U.S. capital markets infrastructure, processing approximately $20 trillion in U.S. Treasury and corporate securities trades daily. This clearing house has been exploring blockchain applications for nearly a decade, but拉萨拉 says the technology has only gained commercial relevance in recent years following the emergence of real-world use cases.
Recently, the company has accelerated its efforts to modernize market infrastructure using tokenization and blockchain technology. This week, DTCCannounced that it plans to begin testing its tokenized securities platform in July, with a broader rollout scheduled for October.
Lassala said that collateral transfer could become the first large-scale institutional use case for blockchain. Tokenized collateral could enable companies to access liquidity in real time outside of U.S. market trading hours, without relying on traditional settlement windows. He illustrated this by noting that Asian companies could obtain U.S. dollars on Sunday in New York by listing tokenized collateral on-chain in real time.
“That’s really powerful,” said Lasala.
But he warned that blockchain systems still face significant challenges in scalability, liquidity fragmentation, and risk management.
For example, net settlement is a challenge. Traditional market infrastructure compresses large volumes of trading activity into smaller settlement obligations, thereby reducing the capital requirements of the entire system.
Lasa La said: "Blockchain is decentralized. Many of the efficiency gains in our industry come from the concentration of liquidity."