The Deutsche Börse Group CSD’s partnership with Ondo Finance and 360X places tokenised equities and ETFs inside regulated European post-trade infrastructure, starting with US names – and sets up a two-way bridge between traditional collateral pools and on-chain venues.
Clearstream has taken a visible step towards integrating public-blockchain assets into its institutional post-trade infrastructure, partnering with tokenisation platform Ondo Finance and Deutsche Börse Group-backed trading venue 360X to bring tokenised US stocks and ETFs into a regulated European market framework.
The first phase of the partnership, announced in mid-April, sees ten Ondo tokenised securities – including AAPLon, MSFTon, NVDAon, TSLAon, SPYon and QQQon – listed for trading on 360X, the ESMA-regulated Frankfurt venue that operates across OTC, MTF and DLT-MTF segments. In the subsequent phase, those assets will be integrated into Clearstream’s custody, settlement and collateral infrastructure, while Clearstream-held traditional securities will, in turn, be made available to Ondo in tokenised form for distribution to its global client base outside the United States.The announcement landed on the same day as Deutsche Börse Group’s $200 million secondary investment in Kraken parent Payward, deepening a partnership first unveiled in December 2025. Read together, the two moves make visible a coherent Deutsche Börse Group strategy; a comprehensive, hybrid market infrastructure capable of processing assets of any technical form within a unified liquidity pool, assembled through equity-aligned partnerships with crypto-native platforms rather than purely organic builds. The Ondo-Clearstream-360X partnership is the post-trade expression of that thesis.
For a capital markets audience that has watched tokenised-equity initiatives come and go, the more consequential signal is not the listing itself but what Clearstream is doing behind it: building out end-to-end on-chain infrastructure to service securities through their full lifecycle, and connecting that infrastructure to the collateral franchise that sits at the heart of its €22 trillion custody book.
The real asset, not a wrapper
Tokenised-equity launches are not new. What has been conspicuously absent, for the most part, is institutional-grade post-trade infrastructure capable of treating those instruments as securities in the full legal and operational sense, rather than as synthetic exposures sitting adjacent to the regulated system.
Thilo Derenbach, Head of Sales & Business Development, Digital Securities Services at Clearstream, tells TradingTech Insight that this is the gap the partnership is designed to close. “We can bring, say, a German equity as a token onto the blockchain: the real asset, with all the rights and duties attached, not a derivative, wrapper or some other construct,” he says.
That distinction matters commercially as well as legally. It is also the philosophical position that underpins much of the recent tokenisation middleware work TTI has covered: Murex made a closely related argument when discussing Murex’s integration with Quant Network’s Overledger, observing that a digital bond should ultimately be treated the same way as a standard bond for FRTB, position management and collateral purposes, even though the settlement rail and operational workflow differ materially. If tokenised securities are to be usable within institutional workflows – pledged as collateral, lent, mobilised across venues – they need to carry the full bundle of rights attaching to the underlying asset, and the reconciliation between the on-chain token and the book-entry position needs to be auditable and supervisor-ready.Derenbach says Clearstream is currently constructing that infrastructure end to end, with a six-to-nine-month build horizon. The approach splits reconciliation by issuance origin: for traditional securities tokenised by Clearstream, reconciliation remains in Clearstream’s environment; for natively issued on-chain securities brought into the traditional world, Ondo performs the reconciliation, and Clearstream de-tokenises the instrument and assigns an ISIN; the same mechanism it already uses to take cryptocurrencies and stablecoins into traditional custody.
Collateral mobilisation as the commercial anchor
The collateral dimension is where the partnership has the most direct commercial substance for Clearstream’s institutional client base, and where its ambitions extend well beyond the Ondo listing. Derenbach describes a two-step model that begins without requiring any tokenisation of collateral at all.
“In the first step, we will connect the on-chain exposure venue to our traditional collateral management system,” he explains. “A client can then pledge traditional securities towards an on-chain exposure without tokenising the collateral itself. The assets stay in the traditional world, but the on-chain exposure location – whichever it may be – can see those assets and the pledge against them.”
In the second step, traditional securities are tokenised and moved on chain, allowing them to be used directly as collateral within on-chain workflows. The sequencing reflects both practical constraints – clients are unlikely to tokenise their entire collateral book in a single motion – and a recognition that the near-term demand signal is coming from a specific corner of the market.
“Increasingly we see web3 players – many of whom came from the retail space – moving into the institutional space and establishing services such as prime brokerage, where clients need to cover exposures,” says Derenbach. “Today, what they can use as collateral is effectively limited to stablecoins, cryptocurrencies or cash. Giving them access to hundreds of billions of euros or dollars’ worth of traditional collateral as a potential pool to cover those exposures, and to do more on the blockchain, is a huge step forward.”
That framing inverts the usual TradFi-to-DeFi narrative. Rather than presenting traditional finance as the latecomer to an emerging on-chain market, Clearstream is positioning the institutional build-out of web3 – particularly the move into prime brokerage – as a demand-side catalyst that the legacy infrastructure is uniquely placed to serve. The scale of the untapped pool gives the argument weight: “We have €22 trillion in custody,” notes Derenbach. “Bringing those trillions onto the blockchain will make a big difference in terms of available liquidity and the usability and reusability of the assets.”
Regulatory perimeter: a preference for modernisation over parallel regimes
The partnership spans multiple regulatory regimes. Clearstream operates as a CSDR-regulated central securities depository; 360X is authorised by ESMA across OTC, MTF and DLT-MTF segments; and the underlying Ondo tokens are issued on Ethereum, Solana and BNB Chain; all public, permissionless networks. Navigating that perimeter is, as Derenbach characterises it, a question of fitting the partnership’s activities into the licensing boundaries of each entity rather than relying on a single unified framework.
On the DLT Pilot Regime specifically, Clearstream’s position is more pointed than the usual cautious endorsement. The regime, which has applied since March 2023 as the EU’s time-bound framework for DLT-based market infrastructures, has so far attracted only a handful of authorised participants – a take-up rate widely attributed to its original €6 billion aggregate volume cap and narrow scope of eligible instruments. The European Commission’s Market Integration Package, published in December 2025 and now working its way through the EU legislative process, proposes to raise that threshold to €100 billion, expand eligibility to all MiFID II instruments, and remove the sunset on authorisations. For a CSD operating at Clearstream’s scale, even the proposed thresholds are a meaningful ceiling, and the broader question of what happens when a Pilot Regime participant grows beyond them has remained unresolved.
Derenbach’s answer is that the regime should not be treated as a permanent alternative track at all. “The Pilot Regime as it stands today was not an option for us from the outset because of the limitations on timeframe, volumes and sizes,” he says. “We would prefer a modernisation of the existing regulatory framework, in our case the CSDR, to make it DLT-ready. That said, we are very supportive of the ‘upgraded’ DLT Pilot Regime, but we strongly see the need for a clear pathway for players that reach the Pilot Regime’s volume thresholds to transition into the CSDR framework to avoid a parallel regime. Generally, we would welcome further alignment between CSDR and the Pilot Regime.”
The position is likely to resonate beyond Clearstream. The question of how Pilot Regime participants graduate into the full CSDR framework once they reach scale has been one of the more awkward structural issues in the European post-trade debate, and a CSD of Clearstream’s standing stating publicly that the answer is to make CSDR itself DLT-ready – rather than building out a permanent alternative track – is a notable contribution to that discussion.
The reverse flow and the private-permissioned constraint
Less prominent in the announcement, but arguably equally significant over the medium term, is the reverse flow: Clearstream making assets it already holds in custody available to Ondo in tokenised form for distribution outside the United States. This sets up Clearstream-custodied European securities as a potential source of on-chain supply for Ondo’s global client base, and frames the partnership as bidirectional infrastructure rather than a one-way on-ramp for US tokenised equities.
There is, however, a specific regulatory constraint shaping how that reverse flow is executed. As a CSDR-regulated entity, Clearstream is required to process its tokenised securities on a private, permissioned chain (it has built this capability on Hyperledger Besu) rather than directly on public infrastructure. Derenbach is clear that this does not preclude those tokens being traded on public venues subsequently, provided the reconciliation connectivity is in place between Clearstream’s environment and the trading venue concerned.
That reconciliation requirement is the operational constant across everything the partnership is attempting. Whether assets are sitting on Clearstream’s own permissioned infrastructure or moving through Ondo’s public-chain rails, the non-negotiable condition for Clearstream’s participation is that the count of outstanding tokens reconciles exactly to the underlying position at every point in time. The need to establish that connectivity venue by venue is, Derenbach acknowledges, a constraint the industry will have to work through individually with each exchange and exposure location.
It is also where the fragmentation risk TTI has flagged in parallel coverage comes sharply into focus. The observation that running parallel initiatives across multiple networks can be read either as prudent hedging or as strategic fragmentation (raised in the context of HSBC’s simultaneous tokenised-deposit work across Canton, Quant Network and EnsembleTX) applies with equal force to the post-trade layer. A world in which each major CSD establishes bilateral reconciliation connectivity with each major on-chain trading venue is not, on its face, an obviously more interoperable one than the traditional post-trade landscape it is intended to complement.
Co-opetition, partnerships and competitive positioning
European post-trade is a market in which Clearstream’s peers – Euroclear, SIX and, at a global level, DTCC – are pursuing their own tokenisation strategies, with varying emphases on private versus public infrastructure, CSD-led versus consortium-led issuance, and institutional versus retail-facing distribution. Clearstream’s distinctive positioning, on Derenbach’s account, rests on the combination of its custody footprint, its collateral management franchise, Deutsche Börse Group’s vertical integration with 360X and Eurex, and, critically, the range of external partnerships it has built with on-chain participants.
The list now spans Ondo, Kraken (in which Deutsche Börse Group has taken the $200 million strategic stake announced this week), Circle, AllUnity and SG Forge. Derenbach argues that no other European market infrastructure has assembled a comparable roster of on-chain partnerships, and that this is a material differentiator in a segment where the infrastructure question is fundamentally one of interoperability. At the same time, he points to the continued co-issuance work with Euroclear on Eurobonds and the joint thought-leadership with Euroclear and DTCC on standardisation and interoperability as evidence that the competitive dynamic in post-trade tokenisation is genuinely a co-opetition one, with the largest CSDs cooperating on the plumbing even as they compete for clients.
What to watch next
Three threads are worth tracking from the Ondo-Clearstream-360X partnership over the coming months.
The first is the build-out of Clearstream’s end-to-end on-chain infrastructure over the six-to-nine-month horizon Derenbach has indicated, and specifically the point at which traditional Clearstream-custodied securities become available as on-chain collateral rather than simply as pledged traditional assets visible to on-chain venues.
The second is the expansion of Ondo’s European footprint beyond the initial ten US-listed tokens, particularly the move into EU-listed instruments that the announcement flagged, and the role Clearstream plays in the custody of the underlying assets for those issuances.
The third is the regulatory conversation Derenbach has explicitly invited: whether European policymakers move towards making CSDR itself DLT-ready, with a clearly defined transition pathway for Pilot Regime participants, or whether the two regimes continue to develop in parallel. A CSD of Clearstream’s scale publicly preferring modernisation over parallelism is the kind of intervention that tends to shape how that debate settles.
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