Financial market infrastructure giant DTCC has struck a deal to buy Securrency as part of a planned push into digital assets.
The deal aims to accelerate the development of a platform designed to “unlock the power of institutional DeFi,” DTCC said in a statement Thursday.
The acquisition will be completed in the coming weeks. At that time, Securrency becomes DTCC Digital Assets. Securrency CEO Nadine Chakar, who joined the company from State Street in January, will lead DTCC’s new subsidiary.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. A spokesperson for the DTCC did not immediately return a request for comment.
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New York-based DTCC, which offers clearing and settlement services, processes trillions of dollars in securities transactions every day, 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 teamed up with WisdomTree to help the asset manager launch ‘blockchain-enabled’ funds that keep a secondary record of shareholdings on the Stellar or Ethereum blockchains.
“Security is a key 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,” said Frank La Salla, CEO of DTCC in a statement. .
La Salla added that “this next generation of financial market infrastructure” will shorten settlement times, improve regulatory oversight and improve investor experience.
Tokenization has been a hot topic over the past year.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink late last year called the tokenization of securities “the next generation for markets.” In recent years, projects and companies have sought to bring physical and financial assets – from debt securities to real estate – into the chain.
“Together we will unlock opportunities to reimagine compliance, liquidity, efficiency and interoperability in trading real assets on the blockchain,” Chakar said in a statement.