Vanguard and Wellington test tokenised MMF shares as collateral on Canton Network

Vanguard and Wellington Management have conducted a collateral trial on the Canton Network in which the assets posted were tokenised money market fund (MMF) shares rather than the government securities that have dominated earlier Canton experiments. Nasdaq’s Calypso collateral management platform served as the operational layer, with the MMF shares tokenised using Nasdaq technology and issued directly on Canton, the privacy-enabled blockchain developed by Digital Asset.

The design logic centres on integration rather than replacement. By placing tokenised assets inside the same collateral pool as conventional instruments, and surfacing margin calls, eligibility checks, and post-trade updates through a single interface, firms avoid building parallel workflows or maintaining separate logins for digital-asset positions. The operational friction that typically slows institutional adoption is treated here as a platform problem, not a technology problem.

Digital Asset chief executive Yuval Rooz, speaking at the Wyoming Salt conference, framed the adoption challenge in similar terms: the technology is rarely the bottleneck; what determines the pace of rollout is whether tokenisation can reach the top of a firm’s priority list. The case made by this trial is that embedding tokenised collateral into existing infrastructure shortens that queue by reducing the build burden on the institution.