The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a leading post-trade market infrastructure provider to the global financial services industry, is introducing an innovative digital collateral management platform. 

This program targets the utilization of blockchain technology in order to make collateral flows seamless across disinter mediated infrastructure, liberating significant capital and operational savings.

Collateral is important to reduce risk and to provide overall financial stability. Nevertheless, with the increasing complexity of financial markets and mounting cost pressures, the call for high-quality collateral also grows. DTCC will demonstrate the new platform through a live show, the 'Great Collateral Experiment', on April 23. The event is the first industry demonstration created on DTCC's digital platform, which launched in October 2024 with the DTCC Digital Launchpad.

The platform is based on an AppChain approach, demonstrating the capability of tokenized collateral management to facilitate mobility and velocity of collateral flow worldwide. The platform seeks to enhance capital efficiencies and liquidity for all participants in the market while promoting the convergence of traditional and digital assets. The platform further facilitates the development of a digital open liquidity ecosystem, enabling the use of applications to optimize the operations of collateral across markets.

“Our goal is to highlight how we can enable real-world, institutional-grade digital collateral market infrastructure,” explained Nadine Chakar, global head of DTCC Digital Assets. “This platform is unique in that we’ve created something more open, flexible, dynamic, and comprehensive than any previous digital collateral initiative."
“We plan to continue building on this collateral model, engaging with the industry and our regulators to develop the standard for tokenized collateral across global jurisdictions, working with the buy-side to give them more direct market access, and laying out the regulatory and legal path to implementation,” she stated

The collateral management platform is developed on the DTCC AppChain, leveraging LF Decentralized Trust's Besu blockchain. The AppChain is intended to offer greater control over privacy, security, and data, utilizing DTCC ComposerX. DTCC is making this new digital financial infrastructure available to market participants, facilitating the traverse of a fractured data landscape with the bringing together of legacy and digital networks. The platform is based on an expandable, industry-led framework on open architecture and common standards.

“Collateral mobility is the ‘killer app’ for institutional use of blockchain – we’ve pulled together a coalition of technologists and market participants to successfully showcase how the speed and openness of this technology can safely and reliably unlock liquidity in traditional markets at scale,” said Dan Doney, CTO of DTCC Digital Assets. “By using smart contracts to automate the full range of collateral