Behind the Scenes of Moving Finance On-Chain with Tokenized Securities

The year 2026 is proving to be the most transformative in digital assets. Finally, the true convergence of digital and real-world assets.

When Talos was founded in 2018, the industry was still arguing the direction and semantics of blockchain versus crypto. Institutions were running Web3 pilots, cautiously testing the waters, when a crypto winter blew through and froze most of the momentum. As crypto made an incredible recovery from the impact of the pandemic, blockchain for tokenized real-world assets steadily progressed in the background.

Now, in 2026, we are back. The technology has run through the wringer – speed, scalability, interoperability – and it has held up. Meanwhile, traditional markets are still stuck in a structure that increasingly doesn't fit into the world we live in. We have 24/7 news cycles and 24/7 prediction markets, but institutions still can’t trade equities and treasuries 24/7. The gap between how information moves and how capital moves is what we at Talos are focused on closing and why we are proud to be part of today’s monumental trade. 

How did we get here

The last seven months of working groups and cross-industry collaboration have made one thing clear: getting tokenized securities trading into live production is a complex problem to solve. It’s broader than a single integration. It involves workflows across the entire trade lifecycle: minting tokens on the network, permissioning wallets, receiving assets into wallets, trading them and settling on-chain. Every one of those steps involves a different party playing a different role. And because digital asset trading hasn’t been treated the same way as traditional securities from a settlement and custody standpoint, bringing those two worlds into alignment is most of the work. Through the DTCC working group, more than 50+ DTCC members engaged in the discussion.

DTCC 

DTCC received its no-action letter from the SEC in December 2025, right as we were closing out the year. Since then, they've been building out their tokenization capabilities, based on a "digital twin" application. They have enabled the tracking of these tokens to their clients and their clients’ customers for whitelisted addresses, creating the ability to move any workflow, DvP, repo, collateral management and more.

Digital Asset & the Canton Network

Digital Asset has accelerated the institutional use cases to make this moment possible by combining the best of two worlds on the Canton Network: the privacy institutions require and the accessibility of a public network. Privacy was built into the protocol design, while enabling interoperability between network participants. It’s a public blockchain that offers the benefits of a private server: you only have visibility into the transactions you're actually party to. That design has removed an important hurdle for institutions looking to bridge from legacy rails to on-chain infrastructure.

Prime & Clearing Brokers 

The interest across prime brokers and clearing brokers to adopt this technology was urgent, and for good reason. Tokenized collateral moves in real time, around the clock, with full visibility into where it sits across the lifecycle. That combination of efficiency, availability and transparency adds up to materially better risk management than primes get from assets that only move during market hours and only reconcile at the end of the day. However, the digital transformation required to bring that promise to production was extensive work – network onboarding, validator selection, custody solutions and trading technology. Marex and DriveWealth were exceptional collaborators throughout, diligently working through workflow design alongside Talos.

Talos

All of these participants – DTCC, the custodians, the traders, the prime brokers and the clearing members – have to connect somewhere to complete this workflow, and each have their own requirements. How does a firm complete the action, negotiate the trade, settle the transaction and keep their compliance records? Furthermore, how do they reconcile how a network like Canton handles privacy and settlement with how DTCC's ledger management and LedgerScan expect to see activity, especially while custody, trading technology and validator infrastructure all have their own requirements layered on top?

Talos sits at that critical intersection. Rather than asking each participant to independently expend the resources to solve for every integration – the network, the custodian, the clearing activity, the liquidity – we consolidate these integrations in one place, so a trader or brokerage connects just once to operate across their ecosystem. Talos is the orchestration layer that turns the working group's vision into the system a trading institution can practically use.

The anatomy of a tokenized trade

The pilot trades supported by Talos involved DriveWealth, a taker counterparty, requesting a quote through Talos’s RFQ platform for a DTC-tokenized asset. Flow Traders, the maker counterparty, then returned a price and the taker executed against it. Next, the tokenized assets were transferred on-chain through Bitgo, the custodian, holding both firms’ wallets, and each firm’s balances were updated with the Marex and DriveWealth, the prime brokers. Later the same day, the workflow was repeated to reverse the trade. The simplicity of the test trades was deliberate, laying the foundation for important parts of the lifecycle – minting, wallet permissioning, quoting, execution and on-chain settlement – before layering on more complex workflows such as netting, batching and multi-party settlement.  

The future of finance 

This is an immense milestone for the future of finance. Trading, liquidity and market access all need to evolve at the speed the rest of our world already operates. We’ve long believed that all assets will eventually become digital assets. July 15 represents a concrete step towards that future, but it also demonstrates how the market will operate in a hybrid world, where assets move across co-existing traditional and on-chain systems that interoperate. Talos is built to support that hybrid state, as well as the end state. 

This is just the beginning, and we have a lot more work to do. We're building the rails to these new markets and workflows that let your trading teams and products go to market faster. Talos is here to help your business scale, keeping you at the cutting edge of finance.

→ Read the DTCC press release: DTCC Turns Tokenization into Reality: U.S. Trades Successfully Processed Using DTC-Tokenized Assets

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^{Disclaimer: Talos offers software-as-a-service products that provide connectivity tools for institutional clients. Talos does not provide clients with any pre-negotiated arrangements with liquidity providers or other parties. Clients are required to independently negotiate arrangements with liquidity providers and other parties bilaterally. Talos is not party to any of these arrangements. Services and venues may not be available in all jurisdictions.} 

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