The Depository Trust Company holds more than $114 trillion in securities. As of Wednesday, entitlements to some of them can move across blockchains while the securities themselves stay put.

Yesterday, DTCC launched its long-awaited Tokenization Service, bringing blockchain transfers into the existing U.S. securities depository. What’s inside:

  1. Eligible assets: Initially 34 securities, drawn from Russell 1000 stocks, major index ETFs and U.S. Treasuries, under an SEC no-action letter from December 2025.

  2. Participants: Twenty institutions have signed access agreements, including JPMorgan, Citi, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Citadel Securities.

  3. Infrastructure: Tokens can move to wallets on Canton and DTCC’s private Besu network, and convert back into conventional DTC positions.

By design, DTCC changes as little as possible. Tokens keep the same CUSIP, economic rights and investor protections, and the underlying securities stay at DTC, so no separate pool of stocks and liquidity builds up onchain.

Settlement stays old-school, too. Instead of settling each trade instantly, DTCC’s clearing arm keeps netting buys against sells, which cuts equity payment obligations by about 98%.

At Sibos, digital assets head Nadine Chakar explained the trade-off: “There’s not enough money on the planet to support everything in atomic settlement.”

DTCC’s ambitions lie elsewhere. In Q1 2027, it plans to launch a Collateral AppChain that automates margin calls, substitutions and collateral agreements, so a fund in Tokyo can borrow against its Microsoft shares without waiting for New York to open.

Fortunately for DTCC, it won’t need Microsoft’s blessing, something NYSE parent ICE and OKX must be rather jealous of these days.

Under the SEC’s innovation exemption, their new tokenized securities venue OKXICE has to give each company 30 days to object to having its shares traded in tokenized form (we reported). As of this week, 30 of the 62 companies on the original list have done so, and counting.

In hindsight, this week may prove an early signal that tokenized equities are nearing peak fragmentation.

IN TODAY’S BRIEFING:

  • Pontes facilitates its first live transactions

  • Generali Investments launches its first tokenized fund share class

WITH INSIGHTS FROM

Emiliano Di
Giammatteo
Generali

Angie
Walker
Apex Group

Jorge
Schnura

HIGH SIGNAL NEWS

  • Pontes facilitates first live securities transactions. BayernLB completed the issuance and settlement of €100 million in tokenized commercial paper purchased by Siemens. Separately, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) issued its first €1 billion digital bond on Clearstream's D7 platform, with settlement via Pontes scheduled for November 2. 🇪🇺

  • HSBC launches HSBC RedCoin. The HKD-denominated stablecoin (RCHKD) is now available through PayMe, HSBC's mobile payments app in Hong Kong, allowing its more than 3.3 million users to make peer-to-peer transfers and pay at over 100,000 merchants. 🇭🇰

  • LSEG receives regulatory approval for digital securities depository. The London Stock Exchange Group has become the third institution, after HSBC and ClearToken, to secure Gate 2 approval from the Bank of England, allowing it to issue and settle digital securities under the UK's Digital Securities Sandbox. Its Digital Securities Depository (DSD) will initially focus on fixed-income instruments. 🇬🇧

  • Clearstream receives regulatory approval for tokenized fund issuance in Luxembourg. Deutsche Börse's post-trade subsidiary has been authorized by Luxembourg's CSSF to act as a Control Agent under Blockchain Law IV, allowing asset managers to tokenize fund share classes within existing UCITS and AIF structures. Clearstream will manage issuance records, track ownership, and reconcile tokenized shares on a permissioned DLT network, while existing fund service providers retain their roles. 🇱🇺

  • Aviva Investors launches second tokenized money market fund share class. The UK asset manager has introduced a tokenized share class of its £22 billion Sterling Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger. Following its USD fund launch in July, the new offering uses a digital twin model, representing fund holdings onchain while retaining the existing offchain fund structure. 💰

TOP STORY

Generali Investments Launches Its First Tokenized Fund Share Class

Onchain fund shares: Last week, Generali Investments, the €759 billion asset management arm of Italian insurer Generali, launched a natively tokenized share class of its existing €13 billion Luxembourg-domiciled euro money market fund (MMF).

  • Why it matters: Generali Investments’ market entry follows a series of tokenized fund launches by major European asset managers over the past two years, including UBS, BNP Paribas, and Amundi. Their approaches broadly fall into two camps. Some, like UBS, have launched entirely new funds whose shares are issued as tokens from the outset. Others, like BNP Paribas and now Generali Investments, take a more conservative route, adding tokenized share classes to existing money market funds.

A hybrid structure: On that route, only the share register moves onchain. Generali Investments issues the tokenized shares on Allfunds’ private blockchain, which serves as the authoritative register of ownership, while the fund itself, from daily NAV calculation to fiat subscriptions and redemptions, runs as before.

  • Who can invest: Generali Investments has also kept the investor base in-house. For now, only authorized Group entities, such as its insurers and the Group treasury, can subscribe.

Education first: The cautious rollout reflects the firm's ambition to prepare its wider organization for tokenization. Generali Investments brings together 13 affiliated asset management firms and more than 2,370 investment professionals across Europe, the U.S., and Asia.

  • “For us, this product is really about education. We want our employees to understand what DLT means, how it impacts operations from a legal standpoint, and how requirements differ across jurisdictions,” Emiliano Di Giammatteo, Chief Operating Officer at Generali Investments, told Blockstories.

Proof before scale: Starting with internal clients also serves a commercial purpose. Rather than chasing early inflows, the asset manager wants to refine the product with the Group’s own insurers before offering it to external investors. If those insurers adopt it, Generali Investments expects their example to lower the trust barrier for third-party clients.

  • “We are not in a hurry to attract a lot of flows now. If we want to one day sell the best product to external clients, we first need to show that it works perfectly for our large internal institutional clients,” Di Giammatteo explained.

Costs of caution: Starting small has two drawbacks. Because the shares stay on a private blockchain and within the Group, they cannot tap the onchain capital behind much of the growth of tokenized money market funds, from stablecoin issuers to DeFi protocols. And running the token register alongside the fund’s existing infrastructure raises operating costs for now.

  • “Efficiency will come, but only once we have a critical mass of users and assets onchain. The hybrid model is the most expensive at the moment, because you have the costs of maintaining legacy infrastructure alongside the costs of developing new platforms,” Di Giammatteo added.

Product development: Generali Investments sees the current share class as a starting point, with a future version potentially moving onto a public blockchain. The firm is also considering allowing Group insurers to transfer fund units directly among themselves instead of redeeming them. Longer term, Generali sees near-instant settlement as a key benefit of tokenization, particularly for its Group treasury, which has expressed interest in faster settlement.

Outlook: How Generali Investments will build out these capabilities is still open. The company is currently designing its target operating model for digital assets, which it expects to finalize in early 2027.

  • “We are analyzing every step of the value chain, from issuance to distribution, to decide whether to partner, acquire, buy, or build internally. There is no one-size-fits-all model, and the right approach may differ between Europe and the U.S.,” Di Giammatteo said.

The bigger picture. These six funds illustrate how differently tokenized money market products can be designed, even when they invest in similar underlying assets. Their capabilities are not simply a measure of technological maturity. Regulatory structures, target investors and commercial strategies all influence the product design.

The differences extend to investor access: Spiko allows investments from €1, while J.P. Morgan’s JLTXX has a standard $1 million minimum and Circle’s USYC starts at $100,000. .

The graphic compares these different approaches, not their relative sophistication.

_____________

“If you’re designing a tokenized fund to be used as margin collateral on crypto exchanges, instant liquidity, stablecoin settlement, and the ability to transfer or liquidate collateral efficiently are critical. If you’re targeting corporate treasuries or stablecoin issuers, the fund’s legal structure, regulatory eligibility, NAV stability and reliable liquidity become more important. For DeFi use cases, I’d prioritize onchain transferability, accumulating yield mechanics and reliable onchain price feeds.”

Jorge Schnura
Onchain Asset Management Expert

  1. 2027 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions (J.P. Morgan Asset Management) — The asset manager sets out its 10- to 15-year outlook across 200+ assets and, for the first time, estimates Bitcoin’s long-term returns: 10% annualized in its base case, -11.2% bear and 16.6% bull. It still views BTC as speculative and excludes it from its main allocation models due to high volatility and unstable correlations.

  2. The Great Rewiring: Money in a New Order (DBS / EY) — Based on a survey of 422 business and finance leaders, the report examines how treasury is adapting to fragmented trade, currency and payment systems. Tokenized money features prominently: 63% use or plan to adopt stablecoins, 53% tokenized deposits and 52% tokenized money market funds, with banks increasingly expected to connect them to existing treasury systems.

→ Want more? Visit Blockstories Library for a curated selection of 120+ reports on digital assets.

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Disclaimer: The information provided in the Institutional Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.

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