Morgan Stanley Puts Stocks and Treasuries on the Blockchain

Morgan Stanley is bringing traditional Wall Street assets onto the blockchain — and it's using the financial industry's own systems to do it.

The bank announced it's one of the first to "tokenize" (turn into a digital token that can live and move on a blockchain) U.S. equities (company stocks) and Treasuries (safe loans you make to the U.S. government that pay interest).

The tool making this possible is the DTCC Tokenization Service, which went live on October 28. The DTCC runs the behind-the-scenes machinery of U.S. markets — think of it as the record-keeper that tracks who owns what. It currently holds over $114 trillion in assets.

How it works: The service takes real securities and creates "digital twins" — exact digital copies that carry the same ownership rights and legal protections as the originals. These tokens can be sent to digital wallets and moved around in minutes instead of days.

Key facts so far:

• 20 firms have signed up, including Bank of America, Citi, J.P. Morgan, Fidelity, and UBS
• The system runs on two blockchains: the Canton Network and DTCC's private Besu network
• More blockchains are planned for 2027
• Over 150 firms helped design the service

Why this matters: Moving assets faster can free up money and make markets more efficient. This is a bank-led approach — a safer, regulator-approved path compared to crypto startups trying the same thing. For example, a competing crypto venue (from OKX and the owner of the New York Stock Exchange) hit roadblocks when 56 companies, including Tesla and Nvidia, objected to having their shares traded there.

The catch: This market is still very new. The International Monetary Fund recently found that tokenized stocks mostly trade outside normal U.S. market hours and remain more volatile and harder to buy and sell than regular stocks.

Bottom line: Some of the biggest names in finance are experimenting with blockchain to modernize how stocks and bonds change hands — a quiet but potentially major shift in how markets operate.

This is an AI-generated summary. Read the original article at: https://decrypt.co/382513/wall-streets-plumbing-onchain-morgan-stanley-tokenizes-securities