The DTCC already won tokenization 
For a decade the pitch was that blockchains would route around the plumbing of American finance. On July 15 the plumbing processed its first live tokenized trades, with forty firms participating and the crypto-native issuers sitting inside its working group instead of competing with it. The incumbent did not lose. It joined, and then it became the largest venue in the category.
Tokenization has been sold for roughly a decade on a specific promise: that putting securities on a blockchain would make the existing settlement apparatus unnecessary. Trades would clear instantly, intermediaries would be disintermediated, and the institutions that sit between a buyer and a share certificate would find themselves routed around by software. 
It was a coherent thesis, it attracted enormous capital, and on July 15 it was answered in a way almost nobody has processed. The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, the entity whose depository arm custodies more than $114 trillion in securities and which processed something in the region of $4.7 quadrillion in transactions last year, ran its first live production trades of tokenized stocks, exchange-traded funds, and US Treasuries. 
More than forty firms took part, including the largest asset managers, the largest banks, and both major American exchanges. Full service launch is scheduled for October. And the crypto-native firms that spent the decade building the alternative are inside the working group helping design it. The incumbent did not get disintermediated. It ran a pilot, and the pilot is now the biggest tokenization venue in the country.
