Wall Street’s clearinghouse is working with blockchain developers to bring one of the capital market’s least glamorous but operationally complex features to the chain: corporate shares.
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, public offerings and other post-trade events could be processed in tokenized markets.
“We’re working with some very good L1s right now, which focus on the ability to process at faster speeds and have greater resiliency,” he said.
Currently, the bottleneck is that most blockchain networks could take a few days to process corporate actions, he noted.
“We process millions of dividend payments a day to feed the industry,” Le Salla said. “We need high-performance L1 to achieve this.”
DTCC is at the center of the U.S. capital markets infrastructure and processes approximately $20 trillion in corporate and Treasury securities transactions each day. The clearinghouse has spent nearly a decade exploring blockchain applications, but La Salla said the technology only gained commercial significance once real-world use cases began to emerge in recent years.
Recently, the company accelerated its push to modernize market infrastructure with tokenization and blockchain technology. This week, DTCC announced that it would begin testing its tokenized securities platform in July ahead of a broader launch in October.
La Salla said the collateral movement may become the first large-scale institutional use case of blockchain. Tokenized collateral could allow companies outside of US market hours to access real-time liquidity without relying on legacy settlement windows. He described a scenario in which companies in Asia could access the US dollar on a Sunday in New York by posting tokenized collateral on-chain in real time.
“That’s incredibly powerful,” La Salla said.
But he warned that blockchain systems still face major obstacles in terms of scalability, liquidity fragmentation and risk management.
One challenge, for example, is clearing transactions. Traditional market infrastructure compresses massive trading activity into smaller settlement obligations, reducing capital requirements across the system.
“Blockchain is decentralized,” said La Salla. “Many of the efficiencies we achieve in our industry are due to concentration of liquidity.”
