Morgan Stanley said it is among the first banks to tokenize real-world assets since the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation launched its tokenization service last week, converting US stocks and Treasuries into blockchain-based representations. The bank posted the news on X on November 3 and made it the subject of a November 4 announcement.
We are thrilled to announce that Morgan Stanley is among the first banks to tokenize real-world assets following the launch of the @The_DTCC Tokenization Service (DTS), converting U.S. Equity and U.S. Treasuries to tokenized form.
— Morgan Stanley (@MorganStanley) November 3, 2026
Launched on October 28, DTS creates tokenized… pic.twitter.com/wUNMnYB5gC
The service lets eligible institutions create digital representations of securities held at the Depository Trust Company while keeping existing ownership rights. DTCC opened it on October 28 with 20 participating institutions, including JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America and Barclays, and says its depository holds about $114 trillion in assets under custody, a figure that covers all holdings, not what has been tokenized.
The news comes with a delay to Morgan Stanley's separate plan. The bank now expects to support tokenized equities on its alternative trading system in the first quarter of 2027, later than its earlier target of the second half of 2026, The Block reported . The DTCC route lets the bank tokenize securities before its own trading venue opens.
Other infrastructure is filling in alongside it. On November 2, the New York Stock Exchange announced four additional transfer-agent partners for its proposed blockchain-based trading venue. Blockhead noted the NYSE plan in January, in a piece on Securitize's revenue surge , as an exchange platform for round-the-clock trading of tokenized securities with instant settlement, pending regulatory approval.
We reported the launch last week, when DTCC switched on its tokenization service with 20 firms and 34 securities . Each token is backed one-for-one by a security held at DTC, which keeps the official records, and the service runs on the Canton Network and DTCC's private Besu chain. Moving a position between conventional and tokenized form goes through DTC's conversion service, which runs during business hours.
That design keeps tokens tied to the existing register, which sits closer to what transfer agents lobbied for than to third-party stock tokens - a debate covered in our August piece when DTCC completed its pilot , noting an IMF warning about faster settlement and a transfer-agent push for issuer-sponsored tokens. A parallel route exists through transfer agents directly, as Blockhead reported when Bitwise said it planned to put Solana ETF shares in tokenized form .
The number to look for is volume: how much of a participant's holdings are tokenized, and whether those positions are then used as collateral or moved onchain rather than just converted. Morgan Stanley has given a date for its own venue, and the reports of its announcement do not say how much it expects to run through the DTCC route in the meantime.
