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Happy Friday! Today we look at DTCC's first live production trades of tokenized securities, run through the depository holding $114T and joined by JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman, and 30 other firms. Yesterday's tape was quiet, but on the one week view the Privacy Index led everything as ZEC and DCR ripped, and a soft June CPI print trimmed September hike odds.
Yesterday we saw a quiet, mixed session. Oracle (+2.3%), Perps (+2.1%), and Modular (+1.8%) led while Lending (-3.0%), Ethereum Eco (-2.9%), and AI (-1.8%) lagged; BTC slipped -0.4% and the S&P 500 added +0.2%. The macro tape did the talking this week: June's consumer price index (CPI) print fell 0.4% on the month, dropping annual inflation to 3.5% against 3.8% expected, while September Fed hike odds eased to 63% from above 75%.
The weekly view is where the story is. Privacy Index (+15.5%) led everything, ahead of Oracle (+12.0%) and Revenue Leaders (+10.2%), with BTC up +4.1%. Crypto Miners sat at the bottom at -8.1% as the AI infrastructure trade cooled; Bloomberg's report that Meta plans a new unit to sell excess GPU capacity challenged the compute scarcity assumption underpinning miners' AI pivots.
Within the Privacy Index, DCR (+24.9%) and ZEC (+22.7%) drove most of the gains, while ZAMA (+4.2%) and XMR (+3.2%) posted more modest increases and RAIL (-14.9%) lagged sharply. DCR broke out on July 13, jumping over 30% in 24 hours. With over two thirds of supply staked, whale-sized orders chasing the privacy rotation likely hit a thin float and forced a breakout from a multi-month descending channel. ZEC's bid is more fundamental: the Ironwood upgrade, locked for July 28 activation, uses formal verification to prove there are no undetectable counterfeiting bugs after June's Orchard pool flaw disclosure.
— Sam
A Fully Digital Wall Street
This past Wednesday, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) ran its first live production trades of tokenized securities. The transactions ran through the Depository Trust Company (DTC), DTCC’s depository subsidiary, which holds more than $114 trillion in securities and sits at the center of the U.S. custody and settlement system. Across its subsidiaries, DTCC processed $4.7 quadrillion in securities transactions last year.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the event, framed it as the clearinghouse’s latest step toward a fully digital Wall Street. JPMorgan converted a portion of its Invesco QQQ holdings into tokenized form, and Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Vanguard, and NYSE were among the more than 30 firms that took part. Other assets tokenized during the session included Microsoft and Circle shares, SPY, the iShares 0–3 Month Treasury Bond ETF, and U.S. Treasuries across several maturities.
The roster extended well beyond traditional asset managers to include Chainlink, Fireblocks, BitGo, Citadel Securities, CME Group, Nasdaq, Circle, Ondo, and Digital Asset. The significance lies in the breadth and scale of the participants. They include the world's largest asset managers, major exchanges, leading market makers, and core digital asset infrastructure providers. JPMorgan has $5 trillion in assets, Vanguard manages $12 trillion, BlackRock $15 trillion, and the NYSE lists $44 trillion in securities.
What sets this initiative apart from earlier tokenization pilots is that these are not synthetic wrappers that merely point to an asset held somewhere else. DTCC is tokenizing the same legal securities it already holds in custody, so the tokens carry the same rights, protections, and ownership as the originals.
The trial ran the tokens through collateral pledges, securities lending, a Treasury-repo delivery-versus-payment transaction, equity settlement, token transfers, and central-counterparty margin workflows, all on production infrastructure rather than in a test sandbox. The conversions happened on two networks at once: HyperLedger Besu, DTCC's private network, and Canton Network, a public network built by Digital Asset for privacy-preserving institutional transactions. The dual deployment reflects a deliberate multichain strategy rather than a bet on a single settlement layer. A December 2025 SEC no-action letter cleared the three-year path to do all this without violating the custody and transfer-agent rules that would normally apply.
DTCC's launch also changes the competitive landscape for crypto-native tokenization. The onchain RWA market, excluding stablecoins, has grown to roughly $35 billion, up almost 500% since the beginning of 2025. Much of that market developed outside traditional financial infrastructure, with issuers like Ondo, Securitize, and BlackRock's BUIDL bringing Treasuries and other assets onto public blockchains where they could settle around the clock and interact with DeFi applications.
DTCC now offers institutions a different path. Instead of moving assets outside the existing market structure, firms can tokenize the same securities already held at the central depository and use them across collateral management, securities lending, repo, and settlement workflows. For many institutions, that reduces the need to choose between traditional market infrastructure and tokenized assets.
This new offering, however, does not mean public blockchains lose their role. Circle and Ondo both participated in the working group that designed the service, and DTCC's decision to support Canton alongside its own infrastructure suggests the goal is interoperability rather than a closed ecosystem. As Nadine Chakar, who leads DTCC's digital assets business, argued, the strategy is to extend trusted market infrastructure into tokenized markets rather than replace it.
Two caveats are worth keeping in mind. First, this is still a controlled rollout. The full DTCC Tokenization Service does not launch until October, with broader access following afterward. Wednesday demonstrated that the system works in production, but it was not an open launch. Once the service goes live, firms that custody assets at DTC will be able to convert securities between traditional and tokenized form and transfer the tokens to wallets of their choosing.
Second, the program rests on SEC no-action relief rather than a permanent regulatory framework. A significant technical failure or a shift in the regulatory environment could alter the terms under which the service operates.
Even so, the broader significance is clear. Tokenization has moved from pilot programs to the infrastructure that underpins U.S. capital markets. Rather than disrupting Wall Street, blockchain technology is increasingly being integrated into it.
Blockworks Research argues that Venice is positioning itself as the privacy layer for AI, aggregating multiple models behind a single interface while giving users stronger privacy guarantees rather than competing to build frontier models. The report highlights growing adoption across subscriptions, DIEM usage, staking, and developer integrations, suggesting users are increasingly paying for AI compute rather than simply speculating on VVV. It also argues the token model creates a direct link between network usage and token demand through DIEM minting and token burns, although execution on inference costs remains the key variable. Overall, the long-term thesis depends on private AI demand continuing to grow and Venice maintaining a strong connection between business success and VVV value accrual.
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