Tokenized treasuries

The first way starts at the custodian: the Depository Trust Company (DTC), a subsidiary of DTCC, holds most US Treasury bills, notes and bonds in book-entry form and received a No-Action Letter from the SEC to run a tokenization service on top of that custody. DTCC calls the tokens "digital twins" of the securities it already holds, minted on request and convertible back to the standard book-entry form. DTCC tested Treasury and equity delivery-versus-payment trades on this service in 2026 with more than 30 firms, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Vanguard and CME Group, and ran a July 15, 2026 trade in production before a full launch later that year (DTCC, 2026).

The second way is a fund: an asset manager buys Treasury bills through a fund and issues tokens for the fund's shares, so a holder gets exposure to Treasuries without holding the securities directly. See tokenized money market funds for how BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's BENJI do this.

DTCC's Global Head of Digital Assets, Nadine Chakar, has said she expects Treasuries to lead tokenization activity, because the underlying security is simple, liquid and already trusted as collateral (reported by TheStreet). What changes for a holder is settlement speed and the hours the asset trades: a token can move between wallets outside normal market hours and can be pledged as collateral the moment it is created. What stays the same is the credit behind it: the token represents a claim on the US Treasury security or the fund holding it, and its value tracks the same yield curve as the paper original.

Fidelity and Ondo Finance run their own tokenized Treasury products alongside BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's BENJI, most structured as a fund or a note backed one-to-one by Treasury bills. Custody banks such as BNY Mellon have also built infrastructure for tokenized Treasury funds. In Europe, the settlement side runs through the ECB's Pontes service, which links DLT platforms to TARGET so a European buyer of a tokenized Treasury product can settle the payment leg in central bank money. Germany tested the same idea with its own government debt: in the Blockbaster project, the Finance Agency of the Federal Republic issued a ten-year federal bond on a DLT system, and its primary and secondary market trades settled in central bank money through a trigger interface to the Eurosystem's payment system, in test trades that were not legally binding (joint press release of the Bundesbank, Deutsche Börse and the Finance Agency, in German).

Tokenizing a Treasury bill removes friction in settlement, not the interest rate risk of holding it. A rise in yields still lowers the price of a tokenized Treasury the same way it lowers the price of the paper security, and a holder who needs same-day cash still depends on the token's liquidity on whichever venue it trades, which for some tokenized Treasury products is thinner than for the underlying bond market itself. DTCC's Nadine Chakar has framed tokenization as a plumbing change beneath the security, useful mainly to the institutions and traders who move large positions and value continuous settlement over the traditional overnight batch cycle.

Finance Loop is the meeting place for people at asset managers, custodians and market infrastructures who follow tokenized Treasury products into settlement and collateral use. The topic runs through tokenization events in Germany, where 21X in Frankfurt operates a BaFin-licensed venue for tokenized securities trading and settlement under the EU DLT Pilot Regime. At Capital & Code in Frankfurt, Franklin Templeton, KfW and Union Investment discuss tokenized money market funds and settlement, and Franklin Templeton spoke with 21X on tokenized assets at a Point Zero Forum side event in Zurich.

Tokenized US Treasuries are US government debt securities, or funds holding them, represented as tokens on a blockchain. DTCC's tokenization service creates digital twins of Treasury securities it already custodies; separate funds such as BUIDL and BENJI issue tokens backed by Treasury bill holdings.

Yes. DTCC ran a production trade with DTC-tokenized assets, including Treasury and equity delivery-versus-payment transactions, on July 15, 2026, and rolled its tokenization service out further in the second half of 2026, with more than 30 participating firms.

The credit risk is the same, since the token represents the same US government security or a fund holding it. The additional risk sits in the technology and the issuer of the token: a holder depends on the platform that mints, custodies and redeems the token working as intended, on top of the ordinary interest rate risk of a Treasury security.