Wall Street's Clearinghouse DTCC Enlists Chainlink for Collateral Management

The firm that serves as the backbone of American securities markets is making its most ambitious bet yet on blockchain, announcing Tuesday that it will integrate infrastructure from Chainlink into its digital collateral platform as part of a push to bring Wall Street’s notoriously slow back-office systems into the 24/7 era.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation said its Collateral AppChain platform will leverage Chainlink’s Runtime Environment and data standard to enable near real-time collateral management across global markets and blockchains. The platform is expected to go live in the fourth quarter of 2026.

The announcement represents a significant expansion of the collaboration between the two firms. The Chainlink collaboration builds on Smart NAV, a 2024 pilot in which DTCC and Chainlink tested bringing mutual fund net asset value data onto blockchains, with JPMorgan, Franklin Templeton, and BNY Mellon participating.

DTCC’s platform is aimed at reducing the delays and fragmentation in today’s collateral systems, where assets are often trapped across institutions and time zones. By tokenizing collateral and automating workflows through smart contracts, the system is designed to enable near real-time collateral movement across both traditional financial markets and blockchain networks.

“By leveraging tokenization and distributed ledger technology (DLT) to modernize collateral mobility, our goal is to enable 24/7, near real-time collateral management across global markets and blockchains,” said Nadine Chakar, DTCC’s managing director and global head of digital assets, in a statement. “The integration of Chainlink’s CRE and data standard will allow us to deliver a unified on-chain environment, bringing on-chain asset prices, valuations and other collateral agreement data to support this transformative industry initiative.”

Chainlink’s Runtime Environment will handle orchestration, data access, and automation for the AppChain, enabling automated workflows covering eligibility checks, asset valuation, margining, collateral optimization, and settlement. Rather than requiring one-off connections to each data source, the Runtime Environment provides a reusable framework that enables the Collateral AppChain to scale across new data types, asset classes, and collateral use cases.

The scale of DTCC’s operations underscores what is at stake. DTCC processed securities transactions valued at $4.7 quadrillion in 2025 and held custody of securities from more than 150 countries valued at $114 trillion.

DTCC recently said that more than 50 companies have joined a separate working group for its tokenized services platform, with a limited live-transaction test planned for July and a full launch scheduled for October—signaling that the organization’s blockchain ambitions extend well beyond collateral alone.

The price of LINK, Chainlink’s native token, is down more than 3% on the day to a recent price of $10.22, but has climbed 17% over the last month.