DTCC Financial News

Today, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) agreed to acquire blockchain startup Securrency Inc. in a deal worth around $50 million, according to a Bloomberg report. 

DTCC says the deal, set to close within weeks, will position it as a leader in bridging best-in-class industry practices with advanced digital technology to encourage acceptance and adoption of digital assets. Securrency will become a fully-owned subsidiary of DTCC and will operate under the name DTCC Digital Assets. Nadine Chakar, CEO of Securrency, will lead the unit and be joined by around 100 other staffers. DTCC has a long history of exploring digital assets and distributed ledger technology.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, which operates the main clearing house for equities in the US, is rolling out a settlement platform that uses distributed ledger technology.

DTCC is working on the prototype in collaboration with The Digital Dollar Project, a non-profit led by former US regulators, tech leaders and executives from Accenture. The pilot aims to demonstrate the direct, bilateral settlement of cash tokens between participants in real-time delivery-versus-payment (DVP) settlement and assess the implications for counterparty risk, capital efficiency and automated workfow.“DTCC has for several years been experimenting, engaging and leading the conversation around the digitalization of financial markets, and Project Lithium represents the next major step in our exploration of DLT, tokenization and other emerging technologies,” says Jennifer Peve, managing director, head of strategy and business development at DTCC.

DSM will offer access to participants through both central and distributed infrastructure, utilising a cloud-based architecture to enable the book entry recordkeeping of securities as well as support the burgeoning digital asset ecosystem by providing the option to create tokenized representations of a security.Architected to be blockchain agnostic, DSM will initially interface with the Public Ethereum Network, but will incorporate additional public and private blockchain support based on client