Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, the backbone of US securities settlement, is building a blockchain-native collateral management platform powered by Chainlink. The system, called Collarate AppChain, is designed to handle asset pricing, valuation and settlement around the clock across international markets.
What DTCC is actually building
Collarate AppChain integrates Chainlink’s runtime environment, known as CRE, to automate collateral workflows that have traditionally relied on manual processes. Instead of humans shuffling spreadsheets or making phone calls to confirm asset values across time zones, smart contracts automatically handle pricing and settlement.
The platform is designed to operate 24/7, and is a meaningful departure from the traditional financial world where collateral management is typically limited by business hours and geographic boundaries. The goal is near real-time collateral movement between different blockchains and international markets.
DTCC announced this initiative on May 12, 2026, during what the company calls the Great Collateral Experiment. Collarate AppChain is scheduled to launch in Q4 2026.
Nadine Chakar, Managing Director of DTCC, built the partnership around the transformative potential of integrated on-chain data. The vision is a shared infrastructure layer that allows multiple participants in the collateral ecosystem, banks, asset managers, and custodians, to connect rather than each maintaining their own siled systems.
The problem this solves
The global collateral market is approximately $15 trillion. Collateral management today includes complex intermediaries, fragmented data sources, and processes designed for the pre-Internet era. When a bank needs to post collateral for a derivatives transaction, a series of verifications, valuations, and transfers can take hours or even days.
This isn’t DTCC’s first foray into blockchain with Chainlink. The two organizations collaborated on the Smart NAV initiative in 2024 to bring mutual fund net asset value data on-chain. That early project appears to have served as a testing ground for the deeper integration currently being rolled out with Colternate AppChain.
Where this fits into the tokenization wave
The collateral use case is particularly important as it touches almost every corner of institutional finance. Derivatives markets, repurchase agreements, securities lending: all rely on efficient collateral management.
Chainlink’s CRE provides DTCC with access to reliable price feeds and cross-chain communication, the plumbing that enables a multi-chain collateral system. DTCC processes 99% of U.S. securities payments each day, making it one of the most important institutional approvals Chainlink has secured.
