Clearstream to tokenise slice of €22 trillion custody book across settlement, collateral

Clearstream is moving to extend tokenisation across its full securities servicing stack, covering settlement, custody, and collateral, rather than limiting it to issuance. The Deutsche Börse Group subsidiary announced a next-generation digital securities infrastructure in June, and an interview with Thilo Derenbach clarifies that this represents both a consolidation of disparate distributed ledger technology activities built since 2018 and a genuinely new expansion of scope. Issuances are expected later this year, with the addressable pool framed against the €22 trillion in assets the firm currently custodies.

Clearstream has consciously excluded equities from its initial instrument set, citing the complexity of corporate actions as a barrier to full end-to-end programmability. The first instruments will instead span fixed income, tokenised money market funds, and retail structured products, where smart contract logic is more tractable. The firm will operate on Hyperledger Besu, a permissioned distributed ledger chosen for compatibility with other financial market infrastructures and with an eye toward a permissionless future, a requirement driven by Europe’s Central Securities Depositories Regulation (CSDR).

The contrast with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is instructive. While the DTCC is beginning with the 1,000 largest equities, Treasuries, and certain exchange-traded funds, Clearstream’s regulatory environment in Europe forecloses permissionless blockchains entirely. Both central securities depositories are preserving full ownership and voting rights on tokenised instruments and maintaining a business-to-business-to-client model, but their starting instrument sets diverge sharply. How quickly Clearstream can move from puddle-sized tokenised volumes to something lake-scale depends on how rapidly the fixed income and money market fund pipeline converts into live issuance.