Regulations

Story: Hashkey Becomes First Asian Firm in DTCC’s Tokenization Group with Major Players

By Dan Saada

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What the Working Group Is Actually Building. The group's core job is to define how tokenized assets get issued, settled, and safeguarded at an…

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The SEC's Role — and Paul Atkins' Innovation Exemption Idea. The regulatory piece here is just as important as the institutional one.

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Why Hashkey's Seat at the Table Matters. For Hashkey specifically, the DTCC membership is a credibility signal in both directions.

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Hashkey just made history. The Hong Kong-based crypto firm became the first Asian digital asset service provider to join the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation's Digital…

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It's a big deal. The DTCC isn't some startup consortium. It's the backbone of post-trade infrastructure in traditional markets, managing $114 trillion in liquid assets that…

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The group's core job is to define how tokenized assets get issued, settled, and safeguarded at an institutional level. Not retail. Not experimental.

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Bridging traditional finance with decentralized finance has been the industry's white whale for years. Lots of pilots, lots of press releases, not a lot of real plumbing.

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Hashkey's inclusion is notable beyond the symbolic "first Asian firm" angle. Asian crypto markets — particularly Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan — have developed sophisticated…

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The regulatory piece here is just as important as the institutional one. Last December, the SEC issued a "no action" letter to a DTCC subsidiary.

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SEC Chairman Paul Atkins went further. At the Crypto Task Force Roundtable on DeFi, he floated the idea of an innovation exemption — a regulatory carve-out that would reduce…

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See also: Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital Fuels $1 Billion Raise, Valuing Polymarket at $21 Billion

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An innovation exemption, if it actually happens, could be a significant accelerant. Right now, firms exploring blockchain-based securities settlement have to navigate rules…

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And the stakes are real. The DTCC's $114 trillion asset base gives any tokenization framework it builds an immediate relevance that a startup consortium simply can't match.

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For Hashkey specifically, the DTCC membership is a credibility signal in both directions. It tells Western institutional finance that Asian crypto firms aren't just exchanges for…

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The working group's broader composition — 100-plus institutions, including some of the largest names in traditional finance — pretty much guarantees that whatever framework…

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