Edel Expands Institutional Push as Tokenization Matures

New York, USA, September 17th, 2026, Chainwire

Edel announced an expanded institutional push for its tokenized equity and commodity markets on Canton, led by board member Brad Klaas, a securities lending and prime brokerage veteran whose career spans BlackRock’s predecessor firms and Franklin Templeton. The push comes as Wall Street’s largest institutions move assets onchain and confront a harder question: what those assets can do once they arrive, and whether the answer gives institutions a compelling reason to change.

As part of that effort, Edel has joined the DTC Digital Assets Solutions Industry Working Group, convened to provide feedback on the creation of the DTCC Tokenization Service. Edel will help shape this work alongside more than 100 other members, including institutions at the core of US capital markets such as NYSE, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citadel Securities. The DTCC Tokenization Service is expected to launch in Q4 2026.

For most of the past decade, the question hanging over blockchain and capital markets was whether the two belonged in the same sentence. That question has largely been settled. BlackRock has tokenized funds. JPMorgan has built blockchain settlement rails. Franklin Templeton has moved investment products onchain. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, the post-trade utility beneath much of the US securities market, is developing tokenization infrastructure of its own.

Yet as the novelty of issuance fades, a less comfortable reality is setting in. Putting an asset on a blockchain does not automatically make it useful inside the machinery of global finance. The markets around it still have to work.

For Klaas, those requirements are familiar. The questions now confronting onchain finance increasingly resemble the ones he has spent decades working through.

Beyond the Token

The first era of real-world asset tokenization was dominated by questions of issuance. How does a fund issue shares using blockchain infrastructure? That question still matters, but the value of a financial asset has never come solely from the ledger it sits on. It comes from everything that can happen around it.

In traditional markets, assets are rarely static. Stocks are lent. Treasuries are pledged as collateral. Positions are financed, margined, cleared and moved between institutions. Dealers borrow securities to make markets, hedge funds borrow them to express short positions, and large asset owners lend portfolios that would otherwise sit idle. This plumbing rarely makes headlines. It is also where much of modern finance actually lives.

That creates a genuine risk for the tokenization movement. If a tokenized security trades in an isolated liquidity pool, cannot be used efficiently as collateral and cannot interact with the systems institutions already rely on, tokenization can simply create another silo. The bigger prize is making the asset programmable without making the market around it worse.

That means addressing liquidity, privacy, settlement and credit. It also means understanding why the existing arrangements work as they do.

What Wall Street Already Learned

Early in his career, Klaas ran global securities-lending operations at Wells Fargo Investment Advisors, the business that became Barclays Global Investors and was later acquired by BlackRock. He says he scaled those operations from just over $1 billion to nearly $40 billion before leaving in 1998, during a period when the firm’s assets under management grew from roughly $400 billion to $1.2 trillion. He went on to build businesses in prime brokerage and electronic trading, and later spent more than four years at Franklin Templeton working on institutional tokenized collateral products and partnerships. His experience spans both the machinery that puts institutional portfolios to work and the effort to bring those functions onchain.

That career arc matters because the two markets are starting to collide. Securities lending turns a passive portfolio into productive capital, but the infrastructure underneath it is demanding. Counterparty exposure has to be managed. Collateral moves, margin changes and securities need to be recalled. Corporate actions have to be accounted for, and settlement needs to happen reliably.

Decades of financial infrastructure exist to make that process look boring. Blockchain changes some of the mechanics, but it does not make those obligations disappear.

Klaas sees an opportunity in how those functions connect. Discussing traditional securities finance with Andrés Soltermann, CEO and co-founder of Edel, he describes “very old systems all lined up in a particular way.” Changing what an asset can do often means working through arrangements that were not designed to adapt together. By contrast, his interest in blockchain rests on composability: the ability to build financial functions that can work with one another and accommodate new uses.

That flexibility helps explain Klaas’s interest in Edel. Asked what competitive advantage a token could give the business, he points to the possibility of using it across several activities rather than confining it to one application. As the infrastructure develops, those uses could open up different sources of income and activity – what he describes as “creating that flywheel around income.” For someone who has spent decades building businesses around the productive use of assets, the attraction is a token whose economic role could expand alongside the markets being built around it.

As a board member, Klaas’s remit spans institutional strategy, senior industry relationships and shaping how Edel’s markets for tokenized equities and commodities on Canton serve institutional participants. He brings the team into conversations with decision makers across traditional finance, while helping translate their commercial and operating requirements into the markets Edel is building.

Canton gives that discussion a practical dimension: qualifying applications can earn Canton Coin rewards for the economic activity they bring to the network. Edel reported in August that it was generating “tens of thousands in revenue every day,” which the company attributes to those rewards. That offers a concrete example of the broader opportunity Klaas describes: earning from participation in the infrastructure, alongside the business built on top of it.

What matters is the overlap between what he spent decades building and the problem now emerging onchain. His experience connects the technology to the business decisions that determine whether institutions will use it.

The Profit Formula

Klaas is clear-eyed about institutional change. Large firms have established revenues, internal obligations and investors whose agreement may be needed before they can adopt a different approach. Their willingness to move, he argues, is affected by “their own profit formula.”

That observation cuts both ways. An institution has little reason to replace a working system merely because a newer technology exists. It has a more compelling reason to consider one that could lower funding costs, improve collateral availability or allow it to do more business with the assets it already holds.

This is where collateral mobility becomes interesting. If assets take hours or days to move between systems, institutions may need additional liquidity to meet obligations while they wait. If an eligible security can be deployed more efficiently as collateral, some of that funding burden could fall. An existing portfolio could support financial activity that would otherwise require a separate pool of cash.

Those improvements have to justify the cost of integration and satisfy the institution’s risk requirements. But they speak directly to the economics Klaas describes. The same concern for profitability that makes a firm reluctant to change can give it a reason to adopt a system that demonstrably improves how it uses capital.

Tokenized Assets Need Something to Do

Edel is exploring one application of that idea: whether securities tokenized by DTC could be recognized directly as margin within Edel Markets.

Its immediate focus is perpetual futures on Canton. The broader ambition is to build capital-markets infrastructure that makes tokenized assets more productive, improving how they move, support positions and serve the institutions holding them.

If the necessary arrangements can be established, an institution might be able to post an eligible security rather than sell it or raise separate cash to fund margin. The potential benefit would come from reducing the friction between holding an asset and putting it to work.

Recognition as margin, however, requires more than a token that can move. The receiving market has to accept the asset, value it appropriately and establish what happens if the position deteriorates or the counterparty defaults. Custody, permissions and enforceable rights remain part of the transaction.

These are the kinds of questions that connect the proposed application to Klaas’s experience. A crypto developer can explain what the technology permits. An institution needs to understand how the arrangement fits its financing, risk and operating requirements. His contribution lies in helping those conversations meet.

DTCC’s wider interest in tokenized collateral gives that discussion a broader context. The aim is to make assets perform useful jobs inside capital markets, rather than merely reproduce them on a different ledger.

Edel’s seat in the DTC Digital Assets Solutions Industry Working Group places it inside that discussion as the Tokenization Service takes shape. The questions being addressed are increasingly those of established capital markets: how assets move, how obligations are secured and how institutions transact with one another.

The Harder Part Starts Now

There is a tendency in crypto to assume that putting finance on a blockchain means replacing the existing financial system. The more realistic outcome may be less dramatic and far more consequential. Existing markets become programmable. Collateral becomes easier to move. Settlement windows shrink. Functions once concentrated among banks, prime brokers and the largest institutions become available to more participants.

Some intermediaries will resist changes that threaten their revenues. Others will see an opportunity to reduce costs or serve customers differently. Adoption will depend partly on whether the benefits reach the people being asked to change.

The most valuable tokenization businesses may eventually have relatively little to do with the act of tokenizing anything. They will be the systems that let those assets move, finance positions, secure obligations and interact with the rest of the market.

Building those systems requires an understanding of the institutions expected to use them. A collateral arrangement has to work operationally, but it also has to make commercial sense to the people providing the assets, accepting the risk and committing the capital.

That is where Klaas’s career becomes newly relevant. He has spent decades inside the businesses whose economics onchain finance now seeks to improve. At Edel, he is helping connect the people building new markets with the institutions that could put them to use.

Klaas helped scale the machinery that puts institutional capital to work; at Edel, he is helping shape how that machinery is rebuilt onchain.

About Edel

Edel is building infrastructure for tokenized equity markets, connecting assets, liquidity, exposure, execution, participation, and institutional financial environments into one programmable market system. More information is available on Edel’s Website and X.