When equities moved from physical paper certificates to electronic book-entry, the industry unlocked a revolution in front-office execution. Dematerialization eliminated the friction of paper storage and T+5 processing, enabling the low-latency trading, tight spreads, and diverse product growth that define today's capital markets.
Post-trade efficiency did not stand still. Over four decades, constant refinements in messaging standards, database architecture, and processing protocols successfully compressed settlement cycles from T+5 down to T+1.
That trajectory is now hitting its natural limit. Better databases and faster messaging protocols can accelerate communication between independent ledgers, but they cannot eliminate the need for those ledgers to continuously reconcile against one another. Each legal entity today is still compelled to maintain and verify its own authoritative record.
This is why the next evolution in market structure shifts from incremental improvements and into persistence: the ability of an asset, through its smart contracts, to exist as its own authoritative, golden-source record across its entire lifecycle, simultaneously updating custodians, clearinghouses, depositories, and transfer agents in real time.
When assets achieve persistence, the commercial impact shifts to unlocking assets trapped behind batch processes and to structural cost elimination:
This persistence is exactly what onchain securities and cash are designed to enable. Leveraging the benefits of a real-time, distributed and immutable industry ledger, these outcomes are becoming a live reality today. In the US, DTCC’s Tokenization Service is opening the door to potentially trillions in tokenized equities and other securities, and, in parallel, regulators are also recognizing that market infrastructure is evolving. The SEC’s recent Transfer Agent modernization proposal permits DLT-based master security holder files for the first time, while its Innovation Exemption, issued September 17, 2026, provides a conditional framework for onchain secondary market trading.
At Digital Asset we created Canton the shared, open-source privacy-preserving rails and support established market leaders and emerging innovators alike to put Canton to work as they build the next generation of capital markets. And none of this happens without the industry itself: the transfer agents, custodians, clearinghouses, exchanges, and infrastructure providers, already doing the hard work of bringing persistence to life. We're grateful to be building alongside them, and our new report with ValueExchange offers a clear, practical view of where that work stands today, and where it's heading next.
Read the full report: The case for tokenised equities, ValueExchange in partnership with Digital Asset.