In crypto, liquidity dominates.
This maxim holds true no matter how you slice up the industry. Liquidity influences everything from token prices to Ethereum’s staking landscape.
Real-world asset (RWA) tokenization on an institutional scale has come into increasing focus in the wake of last week’s announcement that the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the U.S. clearinghouse lynchpin, has been approved to offer federally compliant tokenization services. Now, the crypto industry is confronted with the unknown of how these real-world assets will be distributed onchain.
Today, we’re examining the DTCC’s own tokenization requirements and discussing the role liquidity plays in crowning crypto kings in hopes of better understanding which blockchains stand the best chance of winning crypto RWAs.
🤓 DTCC’s Requirements
In its no-action request to the SEC, the DTCC lays out the technical requirements for key components of tokenization systems, including the underlying blockchain and supporting token-tracking software.
This letter forms the basis for the SEC’s no-action exemption, and specifies that any systems used to perform key functions of the tokenization service must comply with the DTCC’s internal "Tier 2" systems requirements.
Among other things, this criteria will require critical systems components to have, “the ability to operate from a primary and a secondary location, a maximum four-hour recovery time objective, a maximum two minutes of data loss from an outage, and annual out-of-region disaster recovery and resumption testing.”
While the DTCC is opting to remain tech-neutral – it will not forcibly prescribe a particular blockchain or tokenization protocol each tokenized RWA must use – eligible solution combinations must support compliance controls and achieve a Tier 2 systems rating.
DTCC - the $3,800,000,000,000,000 clearinghouse lynchpin of the U.S. financial system - receives tokenization approval from SEChttps://t.co/L48RgMIfux
— Bankless (@Bankless) December 12, 2025
💧 Liquidity Dominates
The DTCC processed $3.8Q (quadrillion) of securities transactions in 2024. It is the highest value financial processor in the world and surpassed $100T in assets under custody this summer. If one was asked to identify the single most important lynchpin in the global financial system, “DTCC” would be a safe answer.
Assuming superior liquidity is bound to win out again in tokenization markets, the DTCC’s near-limitless, preexisting supply of assets arms it with a durable advantage that should ensure everlasting dominance in tokenized securities markets.
Jack Inabinet Dec 3, 2025 • 4 min read
🏆 Which Chain Wins?
Just as the DTCC is destined to become the dominant tokenization service by virtue of its enormous scale, liquidity dynamics dictate that a single blockchain and single tokenization service will inevitably become the default choice for DTCC-sponsored tokenization offerings.
It remains to be seen which blockchain wins the RWA sector, but given the DTCC’s technical requirements, several candidates can likely already be summarily dismissed.
- Solana's extended network outages over four hours are incompatible with the DTCC’s uptime requirements; Solana has experienced multiple disqualifying outages, the most recent of which occurred last year.
- XRP, another smart contract-capable blockchain touted for covert banking integrations, is uniquely qualified to host institutional-grade finance. However, it too has suffered outages; the network last halted in February.
- Although L2s are widely considered the future of Ethereum scalability, they also may be ineligible to offer DTCC tokenization. Contemporary designs use single sequencers that are liable to outages. It is also questionable whether they comply with DTCC requirements for the ability to “operate” from both a primary and secondary location.
- And while a sect of Ordinals-adjacent Bitcoiners may support the launch of tokenized assets on Bitcoin, the ecosystem lacks the requisite smart contracts functionality to support sophisticated financial applications and DTCC-required transfer restrictions.
In this environment, Ethereum could very well become the default.
The globally decentralized blockchain has recorded over ten years of consecutive uptime, making it one of the few blockchain that can achieve the DTCC’s uptime requirements without a doubt.
Even so, the DTCC also requires its critical systems to pass “annual out-of-region disaster recovery and resumption testing.” How can Ethereum (a blockchain designed not to fail) possibly conduct any type of outage recovery testing? And might stratospheric, market-determined gas fees during high-use periods constitute an untenable outage?
Circle’s Arc could be another solution. The blockchain’s permissioned proof-of-authority validator will be both decentralized enough to operate from multiple locations and centralized enough to accommodate testing.
Another contender is Canton, a public blockchain created by Digital Assets that claims to be the only network capable of offering configurable privacy and institutional-grade compliance. Canton purports to support over $6T in onchain real-world assets and process $280B in daily transactions through its network of 500 validators.
Still, nothing prevents the adoption of a different type of proprietary database technology that can operate from more than one location. There doesn't appear to be anything stopping the DTCC from supporting some kind of Fedwire-styled, government-sponsored permissioned ledger.
Ryan Sean Adams Sep 9, 2025 • 6 min read
🧐 Conclusion
Tokenization markets are a winner-take-most game.
Whether DTCC tokenization ultimately settles on an existing general-purpose blockchain like Ethereum, a purpose-built RWA solution like Circle’s Arc, or an unreleased Fedwire-styled government ledger, a future defined by multichain fragmentation appears an unlikely outcome.
Crypto history is unambiguous on this point: liquidity crowns kings. Whichever chain manages to underpin DTCC tokenization efforts stands to inherit a gravitational pull multiple orders of magnitude greater.