Hey, it’s Marc.

For over a decade, Ethereum was supposed to be the future settlement layer for global finance. The public, decentralised backbone that would disrupt centralised clearing houses.

On December 17, 2025, after the SEC’s No Action Letter to DTCC, DTCC selected Canton, a private, permission-based network to tokenise the first tranche of America’s $100T custodial empire. [RELEASE]

Goldman Sachs, Citadel, and BNP Paribas aren’t disrupting the financial system. They’re capturing it. How? Let’s unpack..

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What happened

On December 17, 2025, the DTCC—the post-trade utility processing $3.7 quadrillion annually—announced it will tokenize U.S. Treasury securities on the Canton Network. This move follows a crucial SEC “No Action” letter permitting the Depository Trust Company (DTC) to tokenize assets within its custody. Unlike public chains like Ethereum or Solana, Canton is a permissioned, privacy-first “network of networks.” The initiative is not a sandbox experiment; it targets a production MVP by the first half of 2026. The syndicate backing this (it raised $135M in June 2025) shift reads like a roll call of the financial elite: Goldman Sachs, Citadel, BNP Paribas, and Tradeweb.

Zooming in: DTCC’s move to the Canton Network didn’t come out of nowhere. It followed years of internal work under “Project Ion,” where DTCC tested whether distributed ledgers could handle real U.S. market volumes. The pilot processed more than 100,000 equity transactions a day, proving that this technology could work at a market scale.