Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️
“We are done with POCs, we’re done with experiments. This is about real world assets moving on real rails to make a real difference.” - Nadine Chakar
Last week, July 15, DTCC processed the first live tokenized stock, ETF, and Treasury trades in its history. Not a sandbox. Real shares, real cash, inside the depository that holds $115 trillion in assets and settles four quadrillion dollars of securities a year.
Weeks before that switch flipped, we sat down with the person who flipped it: Nadine Chakar, Global Head of DTCC Digital Assets.
Joining her: Christian Schmid and Roy Choudhury, the BCG senior partners behind “The Future of Digital Assets in Finance”, the firm’s biggest digital asset report yet. Its core claim: this is an infrastructure transition, not an innovation theme, and up to 30% of bank profits are exposed by 2035.
What follows isn’t a recap. It’s the operating picture: what actually went live, what scales first, and the moves BCG is telling bank boards to make now.
📊 Get the report we co-hosted this webinar around: BCG’s full 2026 flagship on digital assets, with the models behind the $88 trillion forecast.
About the guests: Nadine Chakar runs DTCC Digital Assets. Before that she was CEO of Securrency (acquired by DTCC in 2023) and built State Street Digital after running State Street Global Markets, close to 30 years in capital markets plumbing. Roy Choudhury leads BCG’s capital markets practice in North America and has worked with the CFTC on US digital asset policy. Christian Schmid leads BCG’s global banking business from Zurich and has advised banks for 27 years.
“It’s really like driving on the Autobahn and changing the wheels at the same time.” - Nadine Chakar
Why this matters: The three things Nadine calls the “Holy Trinity” converged in eight months.
Infrastructure: DTCC, Nasdaq and NYSE all moved into tokenized securities.
Digital cash: stablecoins passed $300B and a coalition of major banks is launching a shared tokenized deposit platform.
Regulation: the SEC’s December no-action letter gave DTCC a three-year runway, on top of the GENIUS and Clarity Acts.
That’s why 50+ firms, from BlackRock to JPMorgan to Citadel Securities, are now testing live trades ahead of the October launch. The ambiguity phase is over.
🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We produce institutional-grade research that positions you as the authority in your category, then distribute it to 100,000+ decision-makers.
🎯 Jump to the best parts
00:00 Will DTCC Tokenize $50 Trillion?
01:00 Introduction
02:37 Why DTCC Is Building New Market Rails
04:25 Live Tokenization Starts
07:30 Why This Isn't Another Pilot
11:24 How Banks View Tokenization
17:15 The Digital Asset Landscape Explained
20:32 Where The Biggest Opportunities Are
25:26 What's Stopping Adoption?
32:31 Why Banks And Crypto Must Work Together
37:33 BCG's $88 Trillion Prediction
42:11 Why The Future Is Multi Chain
48:18 Risk, Compliance & Smart Contracts
52:13 How Small Banks Should Respond
57:42 Lightning Round
58:59 Final Thoughts
Important Links
📊 The BCG report: The Future of Digital Assets in Finance
Nadine Chakar: LinkedIn
Roy Choudhury: LinkedIn
Chris Schmid: LinkedIn
DTCC Digital Assets: dtcc.com/digital-assets
Our breakdown of the report: The $88 trillion question
Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts
🔒 The full breakdown is for PRO subscribers. This time, thanks to BCG, it’s free.
Our biggest takeaways from this conversation
1. This is an infrastructure transition, not a crypto bet.
Chris has advised banks for 27 years. His frame for what’s happening isn’t the dot-com boom, it’s telecoms moving from circuit-switched to packet-switched networks: a full rebuild of the rails that took twenty-plus years and quietly decided who captured the profit pool.
“There is no reason to get very nervous right now, but really a reason to do strategy and to think hard where to invest.” - Christian Schmid
BCG’s model: up to 15% of bank revenues and 30% of profits exposed by 2035 as money, assets, and settlement become programmable.
The pattern Chris has seen twice before (internet, neobanks): “we overestimate them in the short term, but we underestimate them in the long term.”
The open question isn’t direction. It’s speed, and “who is gonna pay in the end.”
What to do with this: Stop asking “is tokenization real?” Ask: which of our revenue lines sit on rails that are being replaced?
Related reads:
→ BCG’s new digital asset playbook: the $88 trillion question
2. Atomic settlement is a downgrade.
The crypto-native dream is instant, trade-by-trade settlement. The woman who runs the actual depository says the math doesn’t work, and the numbers she uses to prove it are the most clarifying in the whole conversation.
“Just in the US market alone, there’s $115 trillion in assets, and we settle four quadrillion dollars worth of securities a year. I’ve had to Google how many zeros are in a quadrillion in order to wrap my head around that.” - Nadine Chakar
“We are so efficient that we net 98% of our trades. So there’s not enough money on the planet that would allow us to take all that money and settle it in real time gross settlement.” - Nadine Chakar
Netting compresses 98% of gross obligations. Full atomic settlement would require pre-funding volumes that exceed available liquidity, globally.
DTCC’s design choice: digital and traditional shares share one CUSIP, so liquidity never fragments between the old rail and the new one.
The new rails supplement the old, they don’t replace them. “It took us fifty-five years to get to where we are today.”
What to do with this: When a tokenization pitch promises atomic settlement as the headline benefit, ask what happens to netting. If there’s no answer, it’s a demo, not infrastructure.
Related reads:
→ Wall Street is tokenizing itself
3. Collateral is tokenization’s first super app.
Forget retail tokenized stocks. All three guests, independently, pointed at the same unglamorous corner of finance as the place tokenization pays off first: collateral and repo.
“The biggest super app right now for tokenization is around collateral. The ability of moving money at the speed of the network, to be able to pretty much mark to market in real time, that reduces a lot of capital, the cost of capital.” - Nadine Chakar
Trillions of dollars in derivatives margin move between counterparties every day; the US Treasury repo market alone runs above $1 trillion.
These are concentrated markets: “15 to 20 counterparties drive a huge amount of volume” (Roy). A handful of firms agreeing is enough to flip the whole market.
24/7 markets change risk itself: a weekend crisis no longer means waiting until Monday to cover exposure.
Lightning-round verdict: asked what scales first, collateral/repo or fund distribution, Roy didn’t hesitate: collateral and repo.
What to do with this: Track intraday repo and tokenized collateral volumes, not tokenized equity headlines. That’s where the adoption flywheel actually starts.
Related reads:
→ Inside JP Morgan’s $3T tokenization machine
📊 The full collateral and repo analysis is in the report. BCG breaks down the value case business line by business line. Download “The Future of Digital Assets in Finance” →
4. $88 trillion assumes just 16% penetration.
BCG’s forecast is the most bullish we’ve tracked from any major consultancy. So I asked Chris directly how they got there. His answer was refreshingly unguarded.
“You can truly debate whether this should be sixteen in ten years from now or whether it’s like eight percent. We don’t have a crystal ball. I would take it with a grain of salt. It’s not the absolute truth, but simply, 16%, it’s not unthinkable.” - Christian Schmid
The mechanics: 16% of roughly $300 trillion in real-world assets tokenized by 2035, with exponential growth toward the end, and penetration differentiated by asset class (bonds and commodities high, native tokenized equities low).
Today’s ladder runs a factor of ten per layer: crypto in the trillions, tokenized money around $300B, tokenized RWAs a rounding error against $300T.
Nadine’s counter is telling: “I’d be happy with a trillion in the next couple of years... if it’s seven, it’s eighty, it’s a hundred, it really doesn’t matter.” Momentum matters, the point estimate doesn’t.
What to do with this: Don’t debate the number, use the scenario. If 16% happens, what does it do to your trading ROE, your NIM, your fund ops? That’s the exercise BCG is actually selling.
Related reads:
→ The $400 trillion migration, with Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo
5. The winners will be structural orchestrators.
Every chain wants to be the standard. DTCC is refusing to pick one, and that refusal is the strategy.
“The clients don’t care. So in the end, those institutions that can shield all this complexity from clients will actually win.”
DTCC is already live or building on Canton, Stellar, and Besu, with a harmonization layer on top so assets move between chains without fragmenting liquidity or data.
The hard problem isn’t settlement, it’s data: every chain treats data differently, and someone still has to process dividends, interest, and corporate actions on an Apple share trading across multiple chains.
Roy’s end state: a multi-chain world held together by shared standards, “not one chain that conquers it all.”
What to do with this: In any digital asset strategy, separate the bet on chains (unknowable) from the bet on orchestration (structural). The second is where durable margin lives.
Related reads:
→ DTCC’s $20T October debut
6. Risk management is becoming code.
The least discussed chapter of the report may be the most consequential for how banks are actually run: AML checks, transfer limits, and freeze authority move from post-trade processes into the token itself.
“A lot of the risk processes that are done offline today can now be integrated within code... You could have risk by design integrated within the core of some of these infrastructures.” - Roy Choudhury
DTCC’s tokens are “compliance aware”: whitelisting, blacklisting, and risk logic embedded in the smart contract, not bolted on afterward.
New risk classes come with it: smart contract risk, cyber, and quantum, which BCG and DTCC/Euroclear have started codifying into a formal risk taxonomy.
Chris’s honest caveat: code enforces rules strictly, but crises need discretion. “Here it’s put in code, and I think that’s something which is not completely solved yet.”
What to do with this: If you’re building or buying tokenization infrastructure, ask one question: where does human discretion re-enter the system in a crisis? Nobody has fully answered it yet.
Related reads:
→ 12 signals the ambiguity is over
Bottom line
The skeptic’s case writes itself, and the guests made half of it for you: ten years of “innovation via press release,” tokenized RWAs still a factor of 10,000 smaller than the asset pool they’re supposed to absorb, client adoption admitted to be “early stages,” and BCG’s own author saying the headline number could plausibly be half. Banks also have a louder fire alarm ringing: AI ranks above digital assets on nearly every board agenda Roy sees.
But that case quietly conceded its central point this week. The debate was never really about whether tokenization works, it was about whether the core of the system would move. On July 15, the depository holding $115 trillion processed live tokenized trades with the largest firms on Wall Street, on a regulatory runway the SEC already granted. When the deepest, most conservative node in global finance switches rails, “wait and see” stops being the safe option and becomes the expensive one.
The infrastructure question is settled. The only thing left to price is the timeline.
📊 One more time, because it’s worth your weekend: the full BCG flagship report behind this conversation, including the risk taxonomy and the business-line impact models. Download “The Future of Digital Assets in Finance” →
That’s all for now, folks.
– Marc & Team
