Edel Joins DTCC Digital Assets Working Group to Advance Tokenized Collateral and Securities Lending
New York, USA, September 30th, 2026, Chainwire
Wall Street has shown it can bring assets onto a blockchain. Edel, with securities lending veteran Brad Klaas on its board, is building the markets that let those assets be lent, pledged and posted as margin once they arrive.
Edel, a provider of infrastructure for tokenised equity and commodity markets on Canton, has joined the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) Digital Assets Solutions Industry Working Group. The group was convened to provide industry feedback as DTCC develops its Tokenization Service. Within the working group, Edel sits alongside more than 100 members, including NYSE, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Citadel Securities, to help design the future utility of digital assets.
The question of whether blockchains belong in capital markets has largely been answered by recent institutional adoption. BlackRock has tokenised funds, JPMorgan has built blockchain settlement rails, and Franklin Templeton has brought investment products on-chain. Even DTCC, the settlement backbone beneath much of the US securities market, is developing its own tokenisation infrastructure.
In traditional financial markets, a share of stock is seldom left alone. It may be lent to a dealer that needs inventory, borrowed by a hedge fund taking a short position, pledged against a loan, or posted as margin, while large asset owners lend out portfolios that would otherwise sit idle. This constant motion is where much of an asset’s usefulness comes from, and it is the functional dynamic that tokenisation infrastructure is now starting to address.
At the same time, Edel is widening its push into institutional markets under board member Brad Klaas, whose career in securities lending and prime brokerage runs through the firms that became BlackRock and through Franklin Templeton.
A token is only the starting point
The first wave of real world asset tokenisation was mostly about issuance, proving that a fund or security could be represented on a new ledger. That remains important, but a ledger entry alone has never been what makes an asset valuable. A tokenised security that trades only in its own isolated pool, cannot be used efficiently as collateral and cannot connect to the systems institutions already depend on risks becoming just another silo. The harder job is making assets programmable without making the market around them worse, which means solving for liquidity, privacy, settlement and credit together.
The lending veteran in the boardroom
Klaas has spent decades inside that machinery. Early in his career he ran global securities lending operations at Wells Fargo Investment Advisors, the business that went on to become Barclays Global Investors and ultimately part of BlackRock. By his account, he expanded the programme from just over $1bn to nearly $40bn before leaving in 1998, a period in which the firm’s assets under management rose from roughly $400bn to $1.2tn. He then built businesses in prime brokerage and electronic trading, and later spent more than four years at Franklin Templeton working on tokenised collateral products and partnerships for institutions.
He knows how much plumbing sits beneath a lending programme. Counterparty exposure has to be managed, collateral and margin shift constantly, loaned securities get recalled, corporate actions need handling and settlement must be dependable. A new ledger may change how some of that work gets done, but every one of those duties still has to be performed.
Klaas is drawn to blockchain because of its composability: financial functions that can plug into one another, and a token that can serve several activities at once, with each new use opening another potential source of income. On the board, he focuses on institutional strategy and senior relationships, bringing the Edel team into conversations with decision makers across traditional finance and translating their needs into the markets Edel is building.
The Economics Behind Institutional Adoption
Klaas is realistic about what it takes to move a large firm. Established revenue lines, internal obligations and investors all have a say, and in his view an institution’s appetite for change is governed by “their own profit formula”. Nobody replaces infrastructure that works for the sake of novelty. According to the company, what wins attention is a change that shows up in the numbers: cheaper funding, more collateral on hand, more business written on the same assets.
Per Edel, that is why the speed at which collateral moves matters so much. When assets take hours or days to travel between systems, institutions have to hold extra liquidity to cover obligations in the meantime. If an eligible security could be put to work as collateral more quickly, some of that burden could lift, and an existing portfolio could support activity that would otherwise need a separate pool of cash. Any such gain must still justify the cost of integration and meet each firm’s risk standards, but it speaks directly to the economics institutions care about.
Giving tokenised assets a job
Edel’s immediate focus is perpetual futures on Canton. Its broader aim is capital markets infrastructure that makes tokenised assets more productive, improving how they move, how they support positions and how well they serve the institutions holding them. Canton adds a commercial incentive, since qualifying applications on the network can earn Canton Coin rewards for the economic activity they bring.
One idea Edel is exploring shows where this could lead: whether securities tokenised by DTC could be recognised directly as margin within Edel Markets. DTCC’s own interest in tokenised collateral gives that work a natural home. If the right arrangements can be established, an institution could post an eligible security to back a position instead of selling it or raising cash to fund the margin, narrowing the gap between holding an asset and putting it to work.
“Tokenisation has proved that assets can live onchain. What institutions want to know now is what those assets can do for them once they are there,” said Andrés Soltermann, cofounder and CEO of Edel. “If a tokenised security cannot be lent, pledged or used as margin, it is just the same asset in a different place. We are building the markets that give it a job.”
Getting there will take more than a token that moves. Whoever accepts the asset as margin has to value it properly and set out what happens if the position deteriorates or the counterparty defaults, while custody, permissions and enforceable rights remain part of every transaction. These are questions for risk committees as much as for engineers, and they are the ones Klaas has spent a career answering.
“Everything that makes collateral trustworthy in traditional markets still applies onchain,” Soltermann said. “Valuation, default, custody and legal rights are not details to solve later. They are the product, which is why we want people around the table who have run these businesses at scale.”
Putting Tokenised Assets to Work
Moving finance onto blockchains does not mean dismantling the system that already exists. The promise of tokenisation is to make assets more programmable, collateral more mobile and settlement more efficient alongside today’s markets, and the platforms that win are likely to be judged not on how many assets they tokenise but on how hard those assets work afterwards.
That is why Edel has put a securities lending veteran alongside its builders. A market for tokenised collateral only succeeds if the people lending, borrowing and underwriting the risk can make it pay, and few understand that arithmetic better than someone who has run it at scale.Wall Street has already proved it can put its assets onchain. Edel intends to be where they go to work.
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.