During Sibos 2026, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Nadine Chakar, Managing Director and Global Head of DTCC Digital Assets, on The Future Is On podcast, produced by Global Custodian and Chainlink. Their conversation examined what it takes to bring tokenization to market scale, including 24/7 collateral management, interoperability, and the infrastructure connecting traditional markets with blockchain networks.
DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation) is the primary financial market infrastructure for U.S. capital markets. In May, DTCC announced the creation of Collateral AppChain, a shared blockchain infrastructure designed to streamline near-real-time movement, valuation, and settlement of tokenized collateral across global markets.
“Tokenization is the first foundational step but we needed to add utility to this process,” Chakar said.
“Collateral is really the biggest use case that we can get people excited about. This is an outlet where you could take these tokens and turn them into meaningful financial transactions that really unlock value for institutional investors.”
AppChain leverages the Chainlink data standard and Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), a universal orchestration layer for building end-to-end institutional-grade smart contracts. Designed to dramatically accelerate the rate at which institutional capital can flow onchain, CRE is built to capture tokenization’s $867 trillion market opportunity.
AppChain was announced last year as part of DTCC’s Great Collateral Experiment to test whether blockchain rails and tokenization could mobilize and manage collateral across global markets in real time. Chainlink’s data and orchestration standard allows AppChain to provide a unified onchain environment where investors can unlock trapped assets and optimize their use across counterparties and time zones.
DTCC’s tokenized equities are digital twins of traditional equities with the same legal rights and investor protections. This is because DTCC tokenizes entitlement representing a traditional security position that is already held in custody by the Depository Trust Company (DTC), a subsidiary of the DTCC Tokenization Service.
“The DTCC tokenized equity is really the gold standard, because it creates the same relationship that they have with untokenized equity but in a tokenized form,” said Nazarov.
“This opens up a category of users – mainly institutional users – for tokenized equity that wasn’t there before.”
“The reality is the old and the new will have to coexist for a period of time,” Chakar explained.
“That’s why it was important for us to treat the new tokens with the same rigor that we treat the traditional assets.”
In the future, she believes shared onchain infrastructure like AppChain will solve fragmentation by dissolving barriers between time zones.
“We’re very passionate about this. We believe it solves real problems for our members and our participants.”
DTCC built its private, permissioned AppChain on Hyperledger Besu. Integrating Chainlink allows AppChain to access critical real-time data as well as connect with other public and private chains throughout the growing multichain ecosystem.
“We are bringing to market the very carefully curated set of L1s and L2s that need to adhere to a lot of different criteria that are important to us,” Chakar said.
“At the end of the day, we want to meet clients where they are.”
DTCC is also among 24 major financial institutions collaborating with Chainlink to standardize corporate actions processing using AI, CRE, and Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). A production-grade deployment would save the global financial industry an estimated $58 billion in annual processing costs with minimal disruption to existing processes.
Ultimately, Chakar believes interoperability is the key to unlocking any digital asset.
“We shouldn’t care which rail it’s on. We shouldn’t care what type of asset it is. We should care that it’s interoperable, it’s compliance-aware, and that it’s operating 24/7, anywhere that a client needs to manage risk.”
Watch the full conversation.