What DTCC's Blockchain Experiment Suggests About the Future of Settlement
Traditional financial infrastructure is moving to blockchain rails. A recent pilot project illustrates why robust data infrastructure matters as much as settlement speed.
is the Enterprise Strategy & Governance Lead at The Graph Foundation.
In November 2025, I sat down with G. Daniel Doney from for a conversation I'd been looking forward to for months. Dan and I, along with my colleague , had been discussing a question that's been on my mind throughout my career in finance: Can blockchain actually solve the structural inefficiencies that cost traditional finance billions of dollars annually? But more importantly to me, could it make the global financial system a more auditable place for all market participants?
That second question isn't abstract for me. I began my career helping retail investors navigate the chaos of the 2008 financial crisis. I sat across from people nearing retirement who watched decades of savings evaporate with no clear path forward. Farmers and labourers who had done everything "right" were suddenly confronting outcomes they couldn't understand or control.
I often thought of my own mother. She raised me on her own, teaching by day and working as a music teacher by night. Ten-hour days, six days a week, just to make sure I ate. I remember her telling her financial advisor, plainly and honestly, that she didn't understand the state of her own savings. And I remember how unfair that felt. Participation in the system didn't come with protection from it.
The question that's stayed with me ever since is not whether we could build more efficient markets, but whether we could build fairer and more transparent ones.
So when I heard that DTCC, the backbone of global markets that settles trillions of dollars in annual trade activity, completed a significant pilot that put this question to the test, they had my full attention. The work wasn't theoretical. It was an apparent attempt to reduce hidden risk in one of the most systemically important corners of global finance.
The Great Collateral Experiment
The pilot, known internally as the , centered on one of the most critical yet overlooked mechanisms in modern finance: repo agreements. These are the instruments banks use to manage daily liquidity, and traditionally, moving collateral to back these agreements has been a protracted manual process constrained by market hours.
The experiment moved repo agreements onto blockchain rails (what DTCC called their "AppChain") to explore the power of instant settlement. Assets could move continuously in the pilot environment, unconstrained by traditional market closures. Greater capital efficiency would be achievable, since instant settlement allows institutions to run with significantly less buffer capital.
As Dan explained to me during our fireside chat, "Corporate interactions between the issuer of a security, such as Apple, and its shareholders are complex. These include the issuer, transfer agent, banking system, brokerage…there are multiple interactions between these channels for dividends to be paid out. The costs of this are in the order of billions of dollars per year, and there are frequent mistakes due to the complexities of the system."
At a high level, it's easy to grasp the efficiencies that a blockchain-based solution could engender—automating, accelerating, and ultimately simplifying the entire process. But at the protocol level, the implementation needed to be just right, particularly when it came to data handling.
Why Data Infrastructure Matters
One lesson has become unavoidable in this work: a blockchain is only as useful as the data you can retrieve from it. For complex financial calculations like verifying collateral types across multiple jurisdictions or calculating real-time net excess positions, institutions need a way to query onchain information instantly and reliably.
This is where the experiment got interesting from my perspective. , a technology created by The Graph, served as the data layer for the pilot, enabling the queries required to track complex digital assets as they moved through the experimental Collateral AppChain.
The implementation rested on three pillars working together. Subgraphs act as the queryable data layer, surfacing up-to-date collateral positions, obligations, and settlement state across assets. The blockchain settlement itself delivered near-instant transaction finality. An interoperable architecture supported multiple collateral types and workflows across entities and jurisdictions.
In practice, this meant original assets, whether BTC or real-world assets (RWAs), were locked in control accounts while a corresponding wrapped token was issued on the AppChain. Smart contracts handled margin call thresholds and net positions, replacing what had traditionally been time-consuming manual negotiations. A dynamic risk management system gave participants real-time visibility into open positions, enabling faster decisions on collateral eligibility.
The T+5 Second Reality
During our SmartCon conversation, Dan made a point that crystallized something I’d been thinking about for years: In U.S. financial markets, "Normal settlement time is T+1, meaning that all parties agree on its settlement within one day. There's a cost associated with that delay that's hidden within the fees that investors pay for transactions that they execute. Most of the world is still at T+2 — two days."
He then quipped: "Blockchain networks are at T+5 — five seconds," before laying out his goal of moving the entire U.S. financial infrastructure to that timeframe.
But Dan was quick to point out what often gets overlooked: "For all value to settle, there must be agreement across all chains about the ownership structure, and that requires you to be able to extract the data from the chains and then establish the ownership record for those assets."
Dan cited examples like paying dividends when moving a token from one chain to another while preventing double-counting or undercounting to ensure accurate ownership distribution. "There are many blockchain records, and you need to have an overarching record of these records. That's the piece we're working on with The Graph."
He closed with something that resonated deeply with me: "This is not just about finance. This is a revolution in data altogether that is about to be unlocked."
What the Results Tell Us
The outcome of the pilot yielded notable results: blockchain settlement executed almost instantly, enabling counterparties to confirm transfer of value and collateral status in real time. Because all parties shared a single, synchronized view of state at finality, the need for precautionary over-collateralization was dramatically reduced.
From my perspective, this experiment did more than validate a technical architecture. It clarified two things about what actually matters if blockchain is going to operate at an institutional scale. First, institutional finance needs modern settlement. Legacy architectures constrain capital efficiency and introduce risk, and real-time, verifiable state transforms how liquidity and collateral are managed at scale. Second, blockchain data infrastructure is just as essential as the ledger itself. Settlement alone isn't enough: institutions require robust, real-time data access and indexing to operationalize onchain state for risk and reporting.
The Bigger Picture
What DTCC illustrated with this pilot wasn't just the success of a single blockchain experiment. It's a useful example of a much larger transformation happening across traditional finance.
What matters most to me, though, is what this kind of progress means beyond institutions and balance sheets.
When settlement becomes real-time, transparent, and verifiable, risk stops being quietly passed downstream to the people least equipped to bear it. Capital buffers don't need to be inflated "just in case." Errors may be detected earlier. Liquidity stress may become detectable before it cascades. These are the kinds of changes that reduce the likelihood of systemic shocks - the ones that ordinary people only notice when it's already too late.
Experiments like this won't fix everything, and my role in them is small. is one piece of a much larger puzzle, just as DTCC is one institution among many. But taken together, these efforts point toward a financial system that is easier to audit, designed to be more resilient, and less dependent on blind trust.
In my opinion, if blockchain is going to matter, it won't be because it's faster or more elegant. It will be because it helps build markets that could fail less often, are better equipped to detect problems earlier, and serve the people who depend on them, even those who never think about finance at all.
This post is for informational purposes only and reflects the author’s views. It does not constitute legal, investment, or regulatory advice. Pilot results and timelines may not reflect production implementations and may vary based on governance, compliance, and market‑structure requirements.
About The Graph
is the leading indexing and query protocol powering the decentralized internet. Since launching in 2018, it has empowered tens of thousands of developers to effortlessly build and leverage across countless blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, Celo, Soneium, and Avalanche. With powerful tools like Substreams and Token API, The Graph delivers high-performance, real-time access to onchain data. From low-latency indexing to rapid token data, it serves as the premier solution for building composable, data drive dapps.
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