Wall Street’s clearinghouse is working with blockchain developers to bring one of the capital markets’ least glamorous but most operationally complex functions on-chain: corporate transactions.
Frank La Salla, CEO of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), said Wednesday at Consensus 2026 in Miami that the market infrastructure giant is partnering with multiple layer-1 (L1) blockchain networks to improve how dividend payments, tender offers and other post-trade events can be processed in tokenized markets.
“We’re working with some very good L1s right now that are focused on the ability to process at faster speeds, have higher resilience,” he said.
Currently, the bottleneck is that on most blockchain networks it can take a few days to process business transactions, he pointed out.
“We process millions of dividend payments a day to supply the industry,” Le Salla said. “We need high-performance L1s to do that.”
DTCC sits at the center of the U.S. capital market infrastructure, processing approximately $20 trillion in Treasury and corporate securities trades each day. The clearinghouse has spent nearly a decade exploring blockchain applications, but La Salla said the technology only became commercially meaningful when real-world use cases began to emerge over the past few years.
Recently, the firm accelerated its push to modernize market infrastructure with tokenization and blockchain technology. This week, DTCC announced it will begin testing its tokenized securities platform in July ahead of a wider rollout in October.
La Salla said collateral could become blockchain’s first large-scale institutional use case. Tokenized security can give companies outside US market hours access to real-time liquidity without relying on legacy settlement windows. He described a scenario where companies in Asia could access US dollars on a Sunday in New York by sending tokenized security on-chain in real time.
“It’s incredibly powerful,” La Salla said.
But he warned that blockchain systems still face major hurdles around scalability, liquidity fragmentation and risk management.
One challenge is, for example, the netting of transactions. Traditional market infrastructure compresses massive trading activity into smaller settlement obligations, reducing capital requirements across the system.
“Blockchain is decentralized,” La Salla said. “Many of the efficiencies we achieve in our industry are through concentration of liquidity.”
