The launch was preceded by a closed pilot in July, in which more than 30 Wall Street financial institutions took part. According to the DTCC report published on October 16, the project’s framework will be strict at first. The system will start with just 25 liquid instruments: U.S. Treasuries, major ETFs, and large-cap stocks from the Russell 1000 index.
For investors, nothing changes fundamentally: the digital tokens are pegged 1:1 to the underlying securities and retain their CUSIP codes and all legal rights. DTC remains the final owner of the official registry, guaranteeing the usual protection.
How it will work (and why without public networks)
Because large capital is not ready to take risks on open ledgers, DTCC has chosen an isolated architecture. From the end of October, operations will launch on only two closed platforms: the Canton Network (CIP-56 standard) and the corporation’s own private environment based on Hyperledger Besu (ERC-20).
Converting traditional securities into tokens via the UI or API will take no more than 15 minutes, but this can only be done during East Coast business hours (from 2:00 to 18:00 ET). Inside the system, however, institutional players will be able to move digitized trillions around the clock, directly between their wallets.
For the Stellar Development Foundation, this release confirms the status quo. Integration with public networks was originally planned for the first half of 2027, and nobody has changed that schedule. Stellar will join the platform together with Circle’s Arc solution, using its SEP-41 standard to transfer assets.
By that time, DTCC promises to expand the list of available securities, add support for corporate actions, and launch on-chain collateral settlements via digital cash.
This DTCC move is the most large-scale attempt to connect real trillions with distributed ledger technology. But while the private Canton and Besu networks are the first to skim the cream off the commercial RWA tokenization market, Stellar remains on the waiting list until the beginning of next year.
