Edel steps up institutional push as tokenization gains traction

September 17th, 2026, New York, USA. Edel has announced a deeper institutional push for its tokenized equity and commodity markets on the Canton blockchain, guided by board member Brad Klaas. Klaas is a veteran in securities lending and prime brokerage, with experience spanning BlackRock’s predecessor firms and Franklin Templeton. The move comes as major Wall Street players bring assets onchain and face a more difficult question: what those assets can actually do once they arrive, and whether the answer offers a strong enough reason for institutions to change.

As part of this initiative, Edel has joined the DTC Digital Assets Solutions Industry Working Group, which was formed to offer feedback on building the DTCC Tokenization Service.

Edel will help shape the effort alongside over 100 other members, including core U.S. capital market institutions such as NYSE, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Citadel Securities. The DTCC Tokenization Service is slated to launch in the fourth quarter of 2026.

For much of the last decade, the central issue was whether blockchain and capital markets had any connection at all. That question is now largely resolved. BlackRock has tokenized funds. JPMorgan has created blockchain settlement rails.

Franklin Templeton has moved investment products onchain. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, the post-trade utility central to much of the U.S. securities market, is developing its own tokenization infrastructure.

But as the novelty of issuance fades, a less comfortable reality emerges. Placing an asset on a blockchain does not automatically make it useful within global finance. The surrounding markets must still function.

For Klaas, these demands are familiar. The challenges now facing onchain finance increasingly mirror those he has worked through for decades.

Beyond the Token

The first phase of real-world asset tokenization focused largely on issuance. How can a fund issue shares using blockchain technology? That question still matters, but a financial asset’s value has never depended solely on the ledger it sits on. It comes from everything that can be done around it.

In traditional markets, assets are rarely static. Stocks are lent. Treasuries are used as collateral. Positions are financed, margined, cleared, and moved between institutions. Dealers borrow securities to make markets, hedge funds borrow them to express short views, and large asset owners lend portfolios that would otherwise sit idle. This plumbing rarely makes news. Yet it is where much of modern finance actually operates.

This situation presents a true risk for the tokenization movement. If a tokenized security trades in an isolated liquidity pool, cannot be used efficiently as collateral, and cannot interact with the systems institutions already rely on, tokenization might simply create another silo. The bigger goal is to make the asset programmable without harming the market around it.

That means addressing liquidity, privacy, settlement, and credit. It also means understanding why existing arrangements work the way they do.

What Wall Street Already Learned

Early in his career, Klaas ran global securities-lending operations at Wells Fargo Investment Advisors, the business that later became Barclays Global Investors and was eventually acquired by BlackRock. He says he scaled those operations from just over $1 billion to nearly $40 billion before leaving in 1998, during a period when the firm’s assets under management grew from roughly $400 billion to $1.2 trillion.

He then built businesses in prime brokerage and electronic trading, and later spent more than four years at Franklin Templeton working on institutional tokenized collateral products and partnerships. His career spans both the machinery that puts institutional portfolios to work and the effort to bring those functions onchain.

That career path matters because the two markets are beginning to converge. Securities lending turns a passive portfolio into productive capital, but the infrastructure beneath it is demanding. Counterparty exposure must be managed. Collateral moves, margin changes, and securities need to be recalled. Corporate actions must be accounted for, and settlement must happen reliably.

Decades of financial infrastructure exist to make that process look routine. Blockchain changes some mechanics but does not remove those obligations.

Klaas sees an opportunity in how those functions connect. Discussing traditional securities finance with Andrés Soltermann, CEO and co-founder of Edel, he describes “very old systems all lined up in a particular way.” Changing what an asset can do often means working through arrangements that were not designed to adapt together. By contrast, his interest in blockchain rests on composability: the ability to build financial functions that work together and accommodate new uses.

That flexibility helps explain Klaas’s interest in Edel. Asked what competitive advantage a token could give the business, he points to the possibility of using it across several activities rather than confining it to one application. As the infrastructure develops, those uses could open up different sources of income and activity – what he describes as “creating that flywheel around income.” For someone who has spent decades building businesses around the productive use of assets, the attraction is a token whose economic role could expand alongside the markets being built around it.

As a board member, Klaas’s role covers institutional strategy, senior industry relationships, and shaping how Edel’s markets for tokenized equities and commodities on Canton serve institutional participants. He brings the team into conversations with decision-makers across traditional finance, while helping translate their commercial and operating requirements into the markets Edel is building.

Canton gives that discussion a practical dimension: qualifying applications can earn Canton Coin rewards for the economic activity they bring to the network. Edel reported in August that it was generating “tens of thousands in revenue every day,” which the company attributes to those rewards. That offers a concrete example of the broader opportunity Klaas describes: earning from participation in the infrastructure, alongside the business built on top of it.

What matters is the overlap between what he spent decades building and the problem now emerging onchain. His experience connects the technology to the business decisions that determine whether institutions will use it.

The Profit Formula

Klaas is realistic about institutional change. Large firms have established revenues, internal obligations, and investors whose approval may be needed before they can adopt a different approach. Their willingness to move, he argues, is affected by “their own profit formula.”

That observation cuts both ways. An institution has little reason to replace a working system merely because a newer technology exists. It has a more compelling reason to consider one that could lower funding costs, improve collateral availability, or allow it to do more business with the assets it already holds.

This is where collateral mobility becomes interesting. If assets take hours or days to move between systems, institutions may need additional liquidity to meet obligations while they wait. If an eligible security can be deployed more efficiently as collateral, some of that funding burden could fall. An existing portfolio could support financial activity that would otherwise require a separate pool of cash.

Those improvements have to justify the cost of integration and satisfy the institution’s risk requirements. But they speak directly to the economics Klaas describes. The same concern for profitability that makes a firm reluctant to change can give it a reason to adopt a system that demonstrably improves how it uses capital.

Tokenized Assets Need Something to Do

Edel is exploring one application of that idea: whether securities tokenized by DTC could be recognized directly as margin within Edel Markets.

Its immediate focus is perpetual futures on Canton. The broader ambition is to build capital-markets infrastructure that makes tokenized assets more productive, improving how they move, support positions, and serve the institutions holding them.

If the necessary arrangements can be established, an institution might be able to post an eligible security rather than sell it or raise separate cash to fund margin. The potential benefit would come from reducing the friction between holding an asset and putting it to work.

Recognition as margin, however, requires more than a token that can move. The receiving market has to accept the asset, value it appropriately, and establish what happens if the position deteriorates or the counterparty defaults. Custody, permissions and enforceable rights remain part of the transaction.

These are the kinds of questions that connect the proposed application to Klaas’s experience. A crypto developer can explain what the technology permits. An institution needs to understand how the arrangement fits its financing, risk, and operating requirements. His contribution lies in helping those conversations meet.