SmartCon Insights | Unified Ledger Will Become the New Underlying Framework for Global Asset Settlement

Chainlink's annual flagship conference, SmartCon, opened yesterday, bringing together numerous senior representatives from traditional finance and leading DeFi protocols in New York. DTCC Digital CTO Dan Doney and Euroclear's Head of Innovation and Digital Assets, Jorgen Ouaknine, discussed how to chart a path towards a unified ledger. These two global financial market infrastructures are actively promoting the integration of traditional assets and blockchain technology, aiming to achieve a unified ledger and asset tokenization globally. Ouaknine stated that Euroclear currently manages €42 trillion in assets and is working to seamlessly integrate the management of traditional and digital assets, emphasizing that "the fragmented, siloed pilot phase is over," and collaboration and interoperability will be the main focus. Doney stated that DTCC, as one of the world's core custody and settlement institutions, is pushing for approximately $100 trillion in assets to be on-chain to achieve a more efficient settlement model (aiming for T+0). Simultaneously, DTCC is building a new framework that allows traditional securities such as stocks and ETFs to directly enter investors' wallets in token form. Both companies emphasized that future financial markets will not rely on a single ledger but will instead form a "ledger of ledgers" structure, achieving cross-chain and cross-jurisdictional interconnectivity. The two companies are working with partners such as Clearstream and Chainlink to develop the "Digital Asset Security Control Principles" and a risk mitigation framework to ensure asset custody and governance security. Both executives believe that increased regulatory clarity is accelerating institutional adoption of blockchain, particularly in the US and European markets, where CBDCs, stablecoins, and tokenized securities are seeing substantial progress. They emphasized that collaboration between traditional financial institutions and crypto-native companies will be key to driving global asset tokenization and market restructuring.