The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) said on Thursday 12 November that it will connect its tokenization service to Solana, so that eligible securities held at its Depository Trust Company (DTC) can be issued as tokens on Solana’s main network. The link is planned for the second half of 2027, according to the DTCC release, which the Solana Foundation also distributed through PR Newswire. No month, no first security and no fee were given.
Solana is the fourth network named for the service, after the Canton Network, DTCC’s own Besu network and Stellar. The service itself went live on 28 October on Canton and on a private Besu network that DTCC runs. Stellar is due first, in the first half of 2027. Solana is planned for the second half.
The tokens will not be open to everyone with a Solana wallet. Under the SEC staff letter that allows the service, only DTC participants (the banks and brokers that hold accounts at DTC) can register wallets, and tokens can only move between those registered wallets. For retail holders of SOL, nothing changes this year, and the coin showed no reaction of its own on Thursday.
What DTCC announced for Solana, and when
The release is short on mechanics. DTCC says the integration will let eligible DTC-custodied assets be tokenized on Solana’s layer 1 and should support fast conversion of traditional assets into tokens, plus what it calls token lifecycle functions. The DTCC Solana timeline is given only as the second half of 2027. CoinDesk reported the same window.
Frank La Salla, DTCC’s president and chief executive, said in the release: “DTCC is bringing regulated, DTC-tokenized securities to another major blockchain ecosystem.” He presented the move as giving participants more choice of network, with collateral mobility and capital efficiency among the expected gains.
Brian Steele, president of DTCC Clearing & Securities Services, said assets tokenized on Solana “will retain the same investor protections, ownership rights and regulatory safeguards” as securities held the traditional way. Nadine Chakar, global head of DTCC Digital Assets, called interoperability “the essential bridge” to liquid digital markets.
On the Solana side, Nick Ducoff, general manager for institutional business at the Solana Foundation, said in the release that the link would let tokenized securities settle and move “as easily as any other asset” onchain. He also said institutions choose Solana because it “already runs real financial activity at scale”.
For scale: DTCC says its depository provides custody and asset servicing for securities from more than 150 countries and territories, worth about $114 trillion. That figure is what DTC holds in custody, not what is eligible for tokens. According to CoinDesk, the service launched with 34 eligible securities worth roughly $30 trillion, a figure for what could be tokenized, not for what is onchain. Our report on the October go-live covered the 20 signed firms and the first securities.
A DTC token on Solana is not a synthetic stock token
Most tokenized stocks trading on Solana today are wrappers or synthetic products: a token issued by a company that holds the share, or tracks its price, and promises exposure. Holders usually get no vote and no direct claim on the share. Our guide to what you really own with a tokenized stock explains the difference between these models.
A DTC token works the other way round. The share stays inside the US market plumbing. When a participant asks DTC to tokenize a position, DTC moves the shares from the participant’s account into a pooled “Digital Omnibus Account” on its central ledger and mints a token to the participant’s registered wallet. Burning the token moves the shares back. The registered owner of the securities never changes: it stays Cede & Co., DTC’s nominee, as for any share held through a US broker.
These steps are set out in the SEC staff no-action letter of 11 December 2025. The letter also describes LedgerScan, an off-chain system hosted in a public cloud that reads the blockchains and records who holds which token. Its record is DTC’s official books and records for tokenized positions. In practice, Solana would carry the token and its transfers, and DTC’s own software would keep the legal ledger.
Who can hold DTCC’s Solana tokens, and the collateral question
The letter limits use to DTC participants. Each participant registers one or more blockchain addresses with DTC, and DTC screens every address for US sanctions (OFAC) before accepting it. Tokens can move directly from one participant’s registered wallet to another’s, without an instruction to DTC. They cannot go to an unregistered address.
The letter adds two controls that matter on an open network like Solana. Token protocols must support “distribution control and transaction reversibility”, and DTC must be able to move any token to fix erroneous entries, lost tokens or misconduct, using what the letter calls a “root wallet”. A DTC token on Solana will therefore not behave like a freely transferable SPL token. DTCC has not said which Solana token standard or program it will use.
Participants whose activity triggers US tax withholding or reporting duties for DTC are excluded from the pilot, according to the letter. Clients of participants have no direct access, since only wallets registered by participants can hold the tokens. The 20 firms that signed up for the October launch include Barclays, Bank of America, Citi, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and UBS, along with brokers such as Alpaca and DriveWealth, according to the go-live release; others are onboarded on a rolling basis.
Collateral is the use DTCC puts forward most. The go-live release said firms could mobilize collateral “within minutes”, and CoinDesk wrote that tokens should be easier to move and pledge, including outside market hours. There is a limit in the letter, though: DTC itself gives tokenized positions no collateral value and no settlement value in its own risk management. Any collateral use would be between participants and their counterparties. Haircuts, which clearing houses or banks would accept the tokens, and the fees for the service were not disclosed.
What the SEC no-action letter allows
The no-action letter is the legal base of the whole project, though the Solana release does not mention it. SEC staff said they would not recommend enforcement against DTC under several Exchange Act rules if the service runs as described. The letter does not choose a blockchain. It lets DTC publish neutral technology standards and approve networks that meet them, and DTC must publish the list of approved blockchains, the standards and any fees.
Eligible securities are limited to three groups:
- shares in the Russell 1000 index when the pilot launches, plus later additions to the index;
- US Treasury bills, notes and bonds;
- exchange-traded funds that track major indices, the letter citing the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100.
Reading the letter, those groups set the outer limit of what could reach Solana in 2027, unless the SEC widens the relief. That is our reading of the documents; DTCC has not said which securities will be tokenized on Solana first.
The relief is temporary. The letter is withdrawn three years after DTC launches the first version of the service. In the meantime DTC must send SEC staff a report every quarter with the names of participating firms, the value tokenized, the number of registered wallets, the blockchains used, any network it refused and why, and every use of the root wallet to reverse a transfer. Those reports are not public, but they mean the SEC will see how a Solana deployment behaves from its first quarter.
Canton, Besu, Stellar, then Solana: DTCC’s chain queue
DTCC has built the service network by network. The order, from its own releases:
| Date | Step | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Dec 2025 | SEC staff no-action letter for a three-year tokenization pilot | SEC letter |
| 17 Dec 2025 | Partnership with Digital Asset to tokenize Treasuries on the Canton Network | DTCC release |
| 27 May 2026 | Stellar link announced, expected in the first half of 2027 | DTCC release |
| 28 Oct 2026 | Service live on Canton and DTCC’s private Besu network, 20 participants signed | DTCC release |
| 12 Nov 2026 | Solana link announced, planned for the second half of 2027 | DTCC release |
When it announced Stellar in May, Nadine Chakar said DTCC was “excited to integrate multiple L1 and L2 networks”. The October go-live release promised more networks in 2027 without naming them. So far DTCC’s releases name four networks: Canton, Besu, Stellar and Solana. CoinDesk reported that Circle’s Arc is also planned for 2027; the DTCC releases we read do not name it, and Ethereum has not been announced.
Stellar’s head start matters for timing more than for competition. A participant could hold the same Russell 1000 share as a token on Canton, Stellar or Solana, with DTC keeping one book across them. DTCC has not explained how a token would move from one chain to another, beyond converting it back to a book entry and minting it again.
Exchange operators are making their own choices. NYSE picked Avalanche to settle trades on its planned tokenized stock venue, and Formation has told the SEC it will run a 24/7 tokenized-stock venue on Solana for verified investors from early 2027. DTCC’s link sits one level below those venues: it is the depository, the place where the shares actually sit.
Solana’s tokenized stock market today, and SOL’s flat reaction
Solana already hosts a large share of tokenized equities, but of the other kind. CoinDesk, citing RWA.xyz data, put tokenized stocks on Solana at about $600 million, behind BNB Chain and Ethereum, and said Solana was the second most active network by transfer volume this month, with more than $11 billion moved. Most of that activity is in synthetic or wrapped tokens without shareholder rights, according to the same report. CoinDesk also cited a Citi estimate that tokenized assets, equities included, could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030.
SOL showed no reaction specific to the news. It traded around $81.40 around 17:37 UTC on Thursday, down 4.8% over 24 hours, while total crypto market value was down 5.5% and bitcoin 3.7% over the same period. Over seven days SOL had lost about 9.6%. The DTCC link creates no token mechanism for SOL holders: no fee share, no staking role and no supply change were announced, and it will not run before the second half of 2027.
For the network, the gain is reputational first. Every Solana transaction pays a network fee in SOL, so DTC token transfers would add some fee demand once they start, but how much depends on how many participants register Solana wallets. Nobody can measure that yet.
What European readers can and cannot buy
No EU authorization is involved. DTC tokens represent US-listed securities held at a US depository, under an SEC staff letter, and only DTC participants can hold them. A retail investor in France or Italy cannot buy a DTC token directly on Solana. The tokenized US shares sold to Europeans today are different products: Kraken’s xStocks, for example, which added 200 European stocks on 11 November, are tokens that give no vote and no claim on the share. If a European bank that is also a DTC participant uses the service, its clients would still deal with the bank, not with the token.
Open questions before the second half of 2027
The release leaves the practical points open. The main ones:
- which securities will be offered on Solana first, and whether Treasuries or shares come first;
- which Solana token standard DTCC will use to enforce registered-wallet transfers and reversals;
- which participants will register Solana wallets, and whether any fee is charged;
- whether Stellar keeps its first-half 2027 date, the first test of the schedule.
Under the SEC letter, DTC has to make public its technology standards, its list of approved blockchains and any fees, so Solana’s appearance on that list is the next thing to watch. The SEC relief, for its part, runs for three years from DTC’s launch of the service, which leaves the Solana link a limited window inside the pilot unless the agency extends it.