infrastructure
Morgan Stanley says it tokenized US equities and Treasurys via DTCC's new service
Morgan Stanley is among the first banks to tokenize US equities and Treasurys through DTCC's Tokenization Service, launched late October on Canton and DTCC's private Besu network with 20 participants.
Morgan Stanley said on November 4, 2026 that it had tokenized US equities and US Treasurys through the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) Tokenization Service, making it one of the first banks to do so on the new infrastructure. The announcement, made in an X post from the bank's digital-assets team and reported by The Block and CoinDesk, follows DTCC's launch of the service around late October 2026. DTC, DTCC's depository subsidiary with $114 trillion in assets under custody, provides the access layer. The service runs on Canton and DTCC's private Besu network at launch.
What happened
Morgan Stanley's post from head of digital-assets strategy Amy Oldenburg said the firm has completed tokenizations of both equities and Treasurys through DTCC's service. Her stated rationale, per CoinDesk: "The hands-on experience of integrating tokenized securities with established market infrastructure" will guide the bank's future digital-asset capabilities.
The service — referred to variably as the DTCC Tokenization Service (DTS) by participants — was built with input from more than 150 firms and signed 20 participants at launch. Named participants in the two reports: Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, Fidelity Investments, JPMorgan, State Street, and UBS, with the remainder onboarded on a rolling basis.
Mechanism
The service does three things in sequence at the DTC layer:
- Lock the underlying US equity or Treasury position at the DTC.
- Mint a tokenized representation on the chosen blockchain — currently Canton (a privacy-preserving ledger targeting regulated-finance workflows) or DTCC's private Besu network (an EVM-chain variant with DTCC as sole validator).
- Mirror transfers of the token to DTC records, so settlement, corporate actions, and regulatory reporting remain anchored at the central depository.
DTCC has signalled plans to add additional blockchain networks starting in 2027, per Cryptoast's French-language coverage; neither CoinDesk nor The Block named the roadmap chains.
Regulatory framing
Morgan Stanley's execution relies on an SEC no-action letter issued to DTCC in December 2025, which sets the conditions under which tokenized representations of DTC-held securities can circulate without triggering additional transfer-agent or exchange-registration requirements. The letter is a temporary framework tied to defined conditions — not a rule, and not a general-purpose licence for tokenized equities.
That carve-out is what allows the equity-side activity today; the Treasury-side activity sits on more conventional primary-dealer plumbing. The SEC has not, as of this post, issued a comparable rule for secondary-market trading of tokenized equities on retail-facing platforms.
Numbers
- $114 trillion: DTC assets under custody
- 20 participants signed at launch
- 150+ firms provided input to the design
- 2 chains supported at launch: Canton + DTCC's private Besu network
- December 2025: date of the enabling SEC no-action letter
- Q1 2027: Morgan Stanley's target to support tokenized equities on its alternative trading system (ATS), slipped from a prior H2 2026 target per The Block
What to watch
- The next wave of participants and whether non-US counterparties (BNP Paribas is named; others in Europe and Asia-Pacific are likely) get cross-jurisdiction custody models anchored to DTC.
- Volumes on Canton versus the DTCC Besu network. Canton is built for privacy at the counterparty level; Besu is EVM-compatible and more familiar to DeFi-adjacent integrators. Allocation will signal whether banks prefer privacy or composability for the initial RWA flows.
- Tokenized-equity ATS go-live from Morgan Stanley in Q1 2027, and whether the SEC extends the December 2025 no-action letter to cover secondary trading on it.
- Corporate-action handling — dividends, splits, voting. DTC mirrors existing positions; whether tokenized holders receive events on the same calendar as beneficial owners is a live operational question none of the day-one coverage addresses.
- Whether retail-facing wrappers (Robinhood, Kraken, Coinbase) attempt to plug into DTS or continue to issue tokenized-equity products on their own chains.
Context
DTCC's service goes live weeks after BlackRock's tokenized money-market fund (BUIDL) crossed significant milestones on Ethereum mainnet and after JPMorgan's JPMD moved to Ethereum mainnet on October 19. It also lands as Nasdaq and NYSE work parallel tokenized-equity tracks — Nasdaq via its Adena Friedman-signalled collateral-tokenisation plans, and NYSE through Securitize on Avalanche and Solana. The DTC version is distinct from all of those: it does not create a new share class, does not move custody off DTC, and does not rely on a public chain. What it does is unlock programmability on the T+0 ledger for the first time at the depositary layer.
The slip in Morgan Stanley's own retail-facing tokenized-equity ATS from H2 2026 to Q1 2027 is the one data point worth tracking across the bank's quarterly disclosures. DTS gives Morgan Stanley the primary-market rails; the ATS is what would open secondary liquidity, and that date has moved once.