Capital Markets & Trade Settlement

The Case for Onchain Trade Settlement

Regulated platforms across the United States, European Union, and Japan are adopting Avalanche to modernize trade settlement, reduce post-trade complexity, and enable real-time asset transfers.

Why Post-Trade Infrastructure Remains Expensive

When a securities trade executes, settlement does not occur immediately. Even under T+1 settlement, both sides of a transaction remain exposed to counterparty risk until final settlement occurs. Margin requirements, clearing processes, settlement-fail management, and reconciliation workflows all exist to manage the risk created during that window, and they are expensive to run.

Failed settlements cost the global financial industry billions annually through penalties, operational expenses, and manual settlement inefficiencies. Over the past decade, they have generated close to $1T in penalties, and that's before accounting for the operational expenses and manual intervention each failure triggers. Institutions also post collateral to manage settlement risk, tying up capital that could otherwise be deployed elsewhere. Reconciliation adds another layer: the same trade is often recorded and verified independently by the buy side, sell side, custodian, and clearing infrastructure, each operating on its own systems and data standards.

Across the deployments covered here, Avalanche's role is consistent: providing deterministic settlement, near-instant finality, and infrastructure that supports regulated financial assets across jurisdictions.

Securitize: Bridging Regulated Capital Markets

Securitize has become one of the most significant operators in tokenized asset infrastructure globally. In November of 2025, Spain's CNMV authorized Securitize to operate a regulated Trading and Settlement System under the EU DLT Pilot Regime: combining the functions of a multilateral trading facility and a securities depository into a single system, with Avalanche as the settlement layer. The authorization followed four years of regulatory engagement involving the CNMV, ESMA, the Bank of Spain, and the European Central Bank.

The platform combines functions traditionally performed by a trading venue and securities depository into a single system, with Avalanche serving as the settlement layer.

The firm's regulatory permissions have been passported across Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, and its first issuance on Avalanche launched in early 2026. In the United States, Securitize manages tokenized funds for BlackRock, Hamilton Lane, KKR, and Apollo, positioning it as a bridge between the world's two largest capital markets operating on a single regulated digital asset infrastructure stack.

Progmat and the Evolution of DvP Settlement

Japan is emerging as one of the most active markets for tokenized securities settlement, and Progmat sits at the center of that ecosystem.

Progmat announced it would migrate more than ¥439.6 billion in tokenized assets, equivalent to over $2 billion and nearly two-thirds of Japan's entire tokenized securities market, from R3's Corda blockchain to a dedicated Avalanche L1. Japan's digital securities market is projected to surpass 1.05 trillion yen by the end of 2026, and Progmat is the infrastructure backbone for that growth.

The migration also introduces settlement capabilities that go beyond those supported by traditional post-trade infrastructure. Project Keystone enables cross-chain DvP settlement between tokenized securities and stablecoins, as well as payment-versus-payment settlement between stablecoins issued in different jurisdictions. 

ANZ demonstrated both capabilities through a separate pilot with Chainlink, settling tokenized assets on Ethereum against stablecoins issued on Avalanche in a single atomic transaction.

Building Institutional Settlement Networks

The same principles are reshaping broader institutional settlement infrastructure. Tassat Group, which has settled more than $2.5 trillion in transactions across its banking infrastructure history, migrated its Lynq network to a dedicated Avalanche L1. 

The network connects more than 30 institutional participants, including Fireblocks, Galaxy, and Wintermute, and provides real-time settlement and collateral management with full state continuity carried over from the migration.

FIS and Intain are applying similar concepts to loan markets through their Digital Liquidity Gateway on Avalanche. The platform enables approximately 2,000 US community banks to buy, sell, and securitize loan portfolios through tokenized infrastructure integrated directly with FIS systems that serve more than 20,000 financial institutions. 

Together, these deployments demonstrate how Avalanche is being used to modernize settlement workflows across multiple asset classes simultaneously.

Tokenized Funds and Capital Markets Infrastructure

The growth of tokenized funds provides a further indicator that blockchain capital markets are moving beyond pilot programs. 

Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund, VanEck's VBILL, and WisdomTree's tokenized money market products all live on Avalanche, giving institutional investors access to regulated, yield-bearing financial instruments onchain. 

OpenTrade offers stablecoin yield vaults backed by tokenized U.S. Treasuries, European bonds, and money market instruments: letting enterprises keep reserves productive while retaining instant, settlement-final access to liquidity. In 2025, OpenTrade surpassed $100 million in AUM, processed more than $250 million in stablecoin investment and withdrawal volume, and grew its AUM by 550%.

As tokenized securities, settlement networks, and regulated investment products converge on shared infrastructure, the operational boundary between traditional capital markets and digital asset infrastructure continues to narrow in practical terms.

From Settlement Optimization to Settlement Redesign

The transition from T+2 to T+1 reduced risk within the existing system. Onchain trade settlement changes the structure of the system itself. Atomic delivery-versus-payment collapses the settlement window to zero, removing the principal and settlement risk on the on-chain exchange of value: the exposure that margin requirements, reconciliation workflows, and clearinghouse infrastructure exist to manage. 

Across regulated trading venues, tokenized securities platforms, institutional settlement networks, and asset managers, Avalanche is in production today for live products (Franklin Templeton's BENJI, VanEck's VBILL, WisdomTree, and the Tassat/Lynq network) and is the chosen migration target for regulated infrastructure advancing from pilot, including Progmat and Securitize. 

For firms evaluating where next-generation settlement infrastructure is being built, that combination of live deployments and committed institutional migrations is the most direct evidence available.