Wall Street's clearinghouse seeks 'high-performance' blockchains to tokenize corporate actions

Wall Street's clearinghouse is working with blockchain developers to bring one of capital market's least glamorous but most operationally complex functions onchain: corporate actions.

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 collaborating with several layer-1 (L1) blockchain networks to improve how dividend payments, tender offers and other post-trade events could be processed in tokenized markets.

"We are working with some very good L1s right now, who are focused on the ability to process at faster rates, have higher resiliency," he said.

Currently, the bottleneck is that on most blockchain networks could take a few days to process corporate actions, he pointed out.

"We process millions of dividend payments a day to feed to the industry," Le Salla said. "We need high-performance L1s to do that."

DTCC sits at the center of U.S. capital markets infrastructure, processing roughly $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 once real-world use cases began to emerge in the pst few years.

Recently, the firm accelerated its push to modernize market infrastructure with tokenization and blockchain tech. This week, DTCC announced to begin testing its tokenized securities platform in July ahead of a broader rollout in October.

La Salla said collateral movement may become blockchain's first large-scale institutional use case. Tokenized collateral could allow firms outside U.S. market hours to access liquidity in real time without relying on legacy settlement windows. He described a scenario where firms in Asia could access U.S. dollar on a Sunday in New York by posting tokenized collateral onchain in real-time.

"That is incredibly powerful," La Salla said.

But he cautioned that blockchain systems still face major hurdles around scalability, liquidity fragmentation and risk management.

One challenge, for example, is netting 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 that we get in our industry are through concentration of liquidity."