US Treasuries trade on Saturday as banks join Canton blockchain settlement test

Digital Asset and a consortium of major financial institutions have completed an on-chain U.S. Treasury repo transaction on the Canton Network, involving USDC as the cash leg and tokenized Treasuries as collateral.

The trade, executed on Tradeweb during the weekend, is being positioned as an industry first for enabling atomic settlement of both legs entirely on-chain within a public-permissioned institutional network.

Per the announcement, the Treasuries were custodied at the Depository Trust Company (DTC), a subsidiary of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), and then mirrored onto Canton for use as freely transferable collateral.

USDC was minted natively on Canton to support the transaction, enabling instant exchange and removing reliance on traditional banking hours or Fedwire settlement. The execution over a Saturday demonstrated the potential for continuous financing and collateral mobility outside legacy market windows.

Participants included Bank of America, Citadel Securities, Societe Generale, Virtu Financial, DTCC, Circle, Cumberland DRW, and Tradeweb, among others.

The firms described the trade as part of the Global Collateral Network initiative, which seeks to integrate high-quality liquid assets such as Treasuries into a unified, always-on market infrastructure that combines institutional compliance requirements with programmable settlement.

What makes this special?

While tokenized Treasuries are already issued on public blockchains such as Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, XRP, Avalanche, and Stellar by multiple asset managers and fintechs, most existing implementations either settle one leg off-chain or operate without large-scale participation from major banks and central securities depositories.

In this case, both cash and collateral were tokenized and settled atomically on the same ledger within a framework designed for permissioned institutional use, integrated directly with established trading venues.

Tradeweb’s platform handled execution, with the transaction designed to preserve participant confidentiality while demonstrating technical feasibility.

According to the announcement, additional transactions using the same structure are planned later this year as part of broader testing of the network’s interoperability and privacy features.

The Canton Network describes itself as a public, interoperable blockchain with permissioned access for regulated entities, aiming to link separate applications and asset types into a single environment for cross-asset settlement.

The repo trade forms part of its roadmap to connect traditional financial infrastructure with on-chain settlement rails for round-the-clock market operations.

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