BNY Mellon Builds 24/7 US Treasury Settlement System
BNY Mellon is developing around-the-clock settlement infrastructure for US Treasuries, driven by growth in digital-asset demand and expanding crypto custody operations. The bank is prioritising practical outcomes over token-centric metrics, signalling a maturing approach to institutional adoption.
Veranika S
The commercial logic is straightforward. Stablecoins, which reached a market capitalisation of $166 billion by 2024 from effectively zero in 2015, are predominantly backed by US Treasuries and operate on a 24/7 basis. Total marketable Treasury debt stood at $27,728 billion in 2024, yet settlement windows remain confined to business hours, creating a mismatch that forces stablecoin issuers and tokenized fund operators to hold liquidity buffers or accept settlement risk over weekends and holidays. A survey sponsored by BNY Mellon found that 91% of institutional investors are interested in investing in tokenized products, and 41% already hold cryptocurrency in their portfolios, with a further 15% planning to do so within two to five years — figures that frame the Treasury settlement initiative as a response to existing client demand rather than speculative positioning.
BNY is not building in isolation. Tradeweb executed a real-time on-chain Treasury trade on the Canton Network, settling against tokenized cash (USDCx) with participants including Franklin Templeton and Virtu, demonstrating that the technical plumbing for continuous Treasury settlement already exists in live market conditions. The DTCC separately announced it will use the Canton Network as the underlying infrastructure to tokenize DTCC-custodied securities, including US Treasury securities, a move backed by a no-action letter from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. DTCC processes transaction activity measured in quadrillions of dollars on a daily basis, meaning its Canton commitment carries systemic weight that individual bank pilots do not.
The US Treasury TBAC presentation on digital asset growth placed total crypto market capitalisation at $2,385 billion in 2024, up from $197 billion in 2019 and $7 billion in 2015, providing the macro backdrop against which BNY's infrastructure investment is being made. Bitcoin alone reached a market cap of $1,364 billion by 2024, a scale that compels custodians managing trillions in traditional assets to treat digital-asset settlement as a core operational requirement rather than an ancillary service.
Several material details remain undisclosed. BNY has not identified which distributed ledger or private blockchain will underpin the tokenized Treasury pilots scheduled for end-2026, nor has it specified the eligible client categories, minimum transaction sizes, or interoperability arrangements with existing Fedwire infrastructure. The bank has not disclosed whether the after-hours Treasury transaction it facilitated earlier in 2026 involved a specific named stablecoin issuer or the precise settlement mechanism used. The regulatory perimeter for 24/7 Treasury settlement — including how overnight and weekend transactions interact with Federal Reserve operating hours and existing DTCC clearing obligations — has not been publicly addressed by BNY or its regulators.
What the July 22 disclosure concretely establishes is that BNY has already executed at least one after-hours Treasury transaction for a digital-asset client and has committed, in writing to clients, to a two-stage roadmap ending in 24/7 settlement capability by 2027. It does not establish a launched tokenized Treasury product, a named institutional counterparty for the pilots, a confirmed ledger architecture, or regulatory sign-off on continuous settlement operations beyond the existing SEC no-action framework covering DTCC's Canton pilot.
