Wall Street Clearing House is working with blockchain developers to bring one of the most obscure but operationally complex functions of capital markets on-chain: corporate conduct.
The market infrastructure giant is working with multiple layer 1 (L1) blockchain networks to improve the way dividend payments, tender offers and other post-trade events are handled in tokenized markets, CEO Frank La Salla said on Wednesday at the Consensus 2026 conference in Miami.
“We’re working with some really good L1s right now that are focused on the ability to process at faster speeds and have more resiliency,” he said.
He noted that the current bottleneck is that most blockchain networks can take several days to process corporate actions.
“We process millions of dividend payments every day to meet the needs of the industry,” LeSala said. “We need high-performance L1 to do that.”
DTCC is located at the center of the U.S. capital markets infrastructure and handles approximately $20 trillion in Treasury and corporate securities transactions every day. The clearinghouse has spent nearly a decade exploring blockchain applications, but Lasala said the technology only made business sense after real-world use cases began to emerge in the past few years.
Recently, the company has accelerated its drive to modernize market infrastructure through tokenization and blockchain technology. This week, DTCC announced that it will begin testing its tokenized securities platform in July, before launching a wider rollout in October.
Lasala said collateral movement could become blockchain’s first large-scale institutional use case. Tokenized collateral allows companies to access liquidity in real time outside of U.S. market trading hours without relying on traditional settlement windows. He described a scenario where Asian companies could acquire dollars in New York on a Sunday by posting tokenized collateral on-chain in real time.
“It’s very powerful,” Lasala said.
But he warned that blockchain systems still face significant obstacles in terms of scalability, liquidity decentralization and risk management.
For example, one challenge is netting transactions. Traditional market infrastructure compresses large trading activities into smaller settlement obligations, thereby reducing capital requirements across the system.
“Blockchain is decentralized,” Lasala said. “Many of the efficiencies in our industry are achieved through the concentration of liquidity.”