Collateral is the largest, least glamorous inefficiency in capital markets. Nasdaq and The ValueExchange surveyed firms that sit across the collateral chain: investment banks, custodians, prime brokers, asset managers and CCPs. The research showed that, among them, the average managed collateral pool is USD 74 billion, a quarter of which earns nothing. This is due to the fact collateral can sit unremunerated overnight or be held as a buffer against settlement uncertainty. More of it is posted as a buffer, because a firm that cannot be certain a settlement will land, holds more collateral than it needs, over-posting by an average of 6%. This fragmentation makes the collateral management process expensive to administer, with collateral spread across as many as 65 delivery locations and operations accounting for up to 57% of total trade cost. The same research values better mobilisation and less over-provisioning at around USD 340 million a year for a Tier 1 firm. The asset itself does not need to be better; it needs to move more efficiently.
Out of the sandbox, into production
The clearest signal is that collateral has stopped being a pilot line item and started showing up as production volume. Recent examples from across repo, money market funds and cleared margin are evidence of this.
Repo at scale. Broadridge’s Distributed Ledger Repo (DLR) platform processed an average of USD 357 billion in daily repo transactions in June 2026, with monthly volume of USD 7.5 trillion. This is not a proof of concept. It is a live, institutional funding market settling tokenised repo every day, and it has grown from a standing start to trillions a month in under two years. Faster repo turnover is the mechanism behind better balance sheet velocity, the same lever the financing desks in this space care about.
Money market funds as mobile collateral. In July 2026 BlackRock tokenised European money market fund share classes on J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys platform, with digital collateral named as a primary use case. Tokenised money market fund shares matter here because they let a firm keep earning yield on an asset while posting it as margin, which speaks directly to the quarter of the average collateral pool that the Nasdaq and ValueExchange research found earns nothing today.
Cleared margin in production. Deutsche Börse’s Eurex Clearing became the first CCP globally to accept margin collateral mobilised over a distributed ledger, executing its first live transaction with J.P. Morgan moving securities for the Dutch pension fund PGGM via the HQLAx platform in July 2025. Collateral was made available at Clearstream for use as margin without the underlying asset physically moving between custodians. This is the intraday, location-independent mobility that turns the settlement buffer from an operational necessity into a policy choice.
The one to watch. The DTCC, the market infrastructure that clears and settles the majority of U.S. securities, ran live production trades of tokenised DTC-custodied assets in July 2026. More than 30 firms took part, including J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Citadel Securities, BNP Paribas and Vanguard, across collateral pledging, securities lending, repo and CCP margin. In one flow J.P. Morgan tokenised the Invesco QQQ Trust and, the same morning, posted it as collateral to meet a CCP margin requirement at CME. Crucially, the tokenised assets keep the same investor protections, entitlements and ownership rights as the underlying security. This is the difference between a tokenised representation, a digital twin, and a synthetic one. The DTCC Tokenization Service is expected to open for business in October 2026.
These projects are not isolated. The most heavily scaled institutional collateral and settlement projects, where privacy between counterparties is a hard requirement, are converging on the Canton ecosystem. The DTCC service above runs on Canton. So does the first real-time, fully on-chain financing of U.S. Treasuries against Circle’s USDC, completed by a consortium of institutions in 2025. Privacy is the reason. A firm posting collateral cannot expose its positions, counterparties or strategy to the rest of the network, and Canton is built to let institutions transact on a shared public ledger while keeping that information confidential.
The pattern across these examples is the same. Different assets, different venues, different networks, but each one is collateral moving in a live production environment rather than a sandbox. The question for an institution is no longer whether this works. It is whether you are set up to participate when your counterparties already are.
Fireblocks provides the digital asset infrastructure behind workflows like these..
Who does this matter for and why?
Collateral mobility enables efficiencies for many participants in the value chain, most notably the following:
Market makers and liquidity providers. While the ability to move collateral intraday or quicker during a day does not remove the need to post collateral, the operational efficiency from this easier movement removes the need to pre-position as much inventory buffers. This is particularly beneficial if you are working across multiple venues and time zones.
Buy-side COOs and treasurers. If the delivery leg is atomic and movement is intraday, the settlement buffer becomes a policy choice rather than an operational necessity.
Sell-side financing and prime brokerage desks. Faster turnover changes balance sheet velocity and, over time, the economics of the financing book. While this may increase tracking / operational complexity, there are solutions in market such as Tres Finance we cover later in the piece.
CCPs and exchanges. Members fund margin where it is cheapest, which turns collateral eligibility into a competitive question
Custodians and CSDs. Mobility changes the Custodian role rather than removing it. When collateral moves on a shared ledger, the question becomes who provides the trusted record and asset servicing around it. The institutions moving early, Clearstream in the Eurex model, are the ones defining where custody sits in the new workflow rather than waiting to find out.
Asset owners. Pension funds and insurers are providing a lot of the demand behind this trend. The first live cleared-margin transaction over DLT moved collateral for a pension fund, PGGM. For the beneficial owner, faster mobilisation means less drag from idle collateral and tighter control over where assets are pledged.
The figures behind that, from the Nasdaq and ValueExchange survey of investment banks, custodians, prime brokers, asset managers and CCPs: 52% of firms expect to manage live tokenised collateral by end-2026, making it the leading institutional digital asset use case. Seventy percent of respondents experience settlement matching and delivery problems daily. Tokenised workflows could avoid roughly one in eight of today’s failed trades. Collateral moves inside business hours today, roughly 48 hours a week once nights and weekends are netted out. On chain it can move all 168, which represents 120 additional hours a week for liquidity and risk management. Most large firms are starting with intra-entity flows before extending to external counterparties.
What Fireblocks supports for Firms on Canton Today
As set out by my colleague Mor Philosoph in his blog on supporting regulated finance on Canton, Fireblocks has extensive Canton support, which includes:
- Canton contract calls, so institutions interact on Daml contracts directly: settling DVP trades, pledging collateral, running a repo from proposal through close
- Canton wallets with full custody support, in-house validator nodes across two regions, disaster recovery, and visibility via Cantonscan
- Interoperability under CIP-0103, native Canton Coin transfers under CIP-056, USDC on Canton, and self-serve listing for any token-standard compliant asset
- Two-step transaction flows, where an incoming transfer arrives as an offer the receiving institution explicitly accepts
- Bring Your Own Validator, connecting an institution’s own Canton node to Fireblocks for signing and custody ensure best in class digital asset operations and infrastructure
Policy and governance rules apply to Canton transactions as to every other transaction on the platform. Keys, approvals and asset control remain with the client.
To give an example of what this looks like, a tokenised collateral pledge runs like this. The tokenised asset arrives in a Fireblocks wallet the firm controls, under its own keys. Initiating the pledge routes it to the people that firm has designated to approve it, in the order its own policy requires. Once approved, the transaction is signed and the asset is transferred to the counterparty’s wallet. The collateral is accepted by the receiving firm and then returned to complete the transaction. At no point does the asset leave the client’s control, and no third party can move it unilaterally
What a desk needs before it can transact on Canton
Most of the elapsed time in a first collateral workflow goes on governance design, not integration.
- Agree on your node posture. Shared infrastructure or your own validator, and a path between the two. Fireblocks supports both.
- Contract call coverage. Can your provider execute the workflows you need, or only hold the asset? Fireblocks supports both.
- Policy design. Who authorises a pledge, a repo close, an incoming offer? Fireblocks Policy Engine gives the flexibility required to adhere to your normal policies.
- Counterparty reachability. Which counterparties are on the network, under which application?
- Cash leg. What settles the other side, and is it available in your jurisdiction?
- Reporting. A key component of taking digital assets in production is how we have good reporting and governance. Tres Finance, a Fireblocks company, can support this with automated transaction aggregation, continuous balance reconciliation, and compliance-ready data tracking
What’s next and why you should act now
The market is moving, and firms need to be ready to support production collateral workflows. To be ready on day one, your infrastructure and governance need to be working to participate in the latest industry projects. The time to build is now. Approving a pledge over a tokenised asset touches legal, risk, operations and collateral policy, and most institutions move those through committee on a quarterly cycle. That leaves one or two cycles before general availability.
The firms transacting in the first months will be the ones that started the internal work before the infrastructure was ready. If the six questions above are on your desk rather than settled, that work starts now, not in October. We can walk you through what is live today and what standing up wallet infrastructure solution to support the project takes.
