Retail Players Are About to Realize How Much 24/7 Needs Repo

Talos CEO and Co-Founder Anton Katz sat down with Anna Reitman at Finadium to talk about Talos's involvement in the DTCC Tokenization Service and what it takes to run capital markets 24/7.

Read the full article on Finadium → (subscription required)

Key highlights from the article

From DTCC pilot to go-live

Talos took part in the DTCC production trades in July. It tested the trading and settlement infrastructure behind two real-world use cases, connecting counterparties and enabling on-chain workflows for equity and US Treasury trades. Anton said July’s soft launch showed how hard it is to change capital markets.

For the October go-live, Talos’s role expanded beyond trading and post-trade to include RFQ, booking, risk and P&L. Anton expects more market participants to join, with a growing focus on scale and automation.

A hybrid, 24/7 future

Anton sees a “substantial hybrid path” of on-chain and off-chain assets. Trading is moving to 24/7, while payments and collateral movements remain stuck in banking hours.

“People want to trade during the weekend (and) need to adjust risk, there’s collateral and margin to manage during the weekend — managing all that in 24/7 will require tokenized assets, both on the cash side and on the capital markets leg.”

Retail will need institutional rails

Collateral management, treasury optimization and margin have mostly been institutional concerns. That will change as retail-facing platforms adopt 24/7 trading and need institutional-grade infrastructure for margin maintenance. Anton pointed to Talos’s partnership with Nasdaq Calypso, which brings tokenized infrastructure and assets across multiple chains to Calypso’s existing customer base.

“Those rails generally don’t exist today until you start going towards tokenization (and) that’s why we’re starting to see real movement on use cases like repo, collateral management, treasury optimization, cash management activities… It’s now in the realm of a necessary portion of your business.”

A more complex data landscape

Anton cautioned that institutions are underestimating how much the data landscape is changing. That includes DeFi yield rates across asset pools and newer data sources such as perpetual swaps, prediction markets and pre-IPO markets.

“Across our portfolio management system, the trading system, the settlement system, the data systems, we’re trying to abstract away all the underlying complexity… The idea is to figure out how do you make your clients’ lives easier as they’re ramping up to take on this completely new infrastructure, which is digital assets.”

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