DTCC tees up institutional DeFi push with Securrency buy

Financial market infrastructure giant DTCC has inked a deal to buy Securrency as part of a planned digital assets push.

The deal is meant to quicken the development of a platform designed to “unlock the power of institutional DeFi,” DTCC said in a Thursday statement.

The acquisition is set to close in the next few weeks. At that point, Securrency will become DTCC Digital Assets. Securrency CEO Nadine Chakar, who joined the firm from State Street in January, will lead the new DTCC subsidiary.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. A DTCC spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

New York-based DTCC, which offers clearing and settlement services, processes trillions of dollars in securities transactions daily, according to its website.

Securrency is a blockchain-based financial and regulatory technology developer that raised $30 million in 2021 from State Street, US Bank, WisdomTree Investments and others. It has worked with WisdomTree to help the asset manager launch “blockchain-enabled” funds that keep a secondary record of share ownership on the Stellar or Ethereum blockchains.

“Securrency is an important strategic acquisition that will give us the technology to drive market-wide transformation by enabling end-to-end digital lifecycle processing for tokenized assets, digital currencies and other financial instruments,” DTCC CEO Frank La Salla said in a statement.

La Salla added that “this next generation of financial market infrastructure” is set to reduce settlement times, enhance regulatory oversight and improve investor experience.

Tokenization has been a hot topic over the past year.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink called the tokenization of securities “the next generation for markets” late last year. Projects and companies in recent years have sought to bring physical and financial assets — from debt securities to real estate properties — on-chain.

“Together, we will unlock opportunities to reimagine compliance, liquidity, efficiency and interoperability in trading real-world assets on the blockchain,” Chakar said in a statement.

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