BNY Completes First Tokenised Collateral Trade on Major Triparty Repo Platform

BNY has completed what it describes as the first use of tokenised collateral on a major triparty repo platform. Citadel Securities purchased a two-year Treasury note on Tradeweb, BNY recorded a tokenised representation on its private distributed ledger, and that token served as collateral in an overnight triparty repo. Unusually, BNY acted as both triparty agent and cash lender, a departure from the standard arrangement in which the agent sits between a dealer and a separate cash provider such as a money market fund. BNY reports the bond settled within minutes rather than on the conventional T+1 cycle.

Whether a distributed ledger was actually necessary to achieve that speed is a fair question. BNY already clears around $24 trillion a day and, given its dominant position as the only major US triparty agent since JPMorgan‘s 2019 exit, trades between its own clients can settle across its internal books in real time without any blockchain involvement. The Treasury token may alternatively have been created as a receivable pending conventional settlement, which would further complicate the attribution of speed to tokenisation itself.

BNY’s own track record makes the question sharper. The bank launched intraday repo in early 2025, with UBS borrowing from Swiss Re on existing triparty documentation, and has settled Treasuries after hours using conventional processes, all without a distributed ledger. The bank offers two reasons for pursuing tokenisation here, and a third possibility it does not state may prove the most consequential for how the market reads this trade.