Broadridge says its blockchain repo platform handled $359 billion a day
Wall Street's blockchain experiment has found its most concrete use yet, and it has nothing to do with memecoins. Broadridge, the financial technology company, said its distributed-ledger repo platform processed an average of $359 billion a day in September, or $7.5 trillion across the month.
Repo, short for repurchase agreement, is a secured borrowing deal: one institution temporarily sells securities, usually government bonds, to another for cash and agrees to buy them back later at a slightly higher price. It lets dealers finance bond inventories without selling long-term holdings whenever a payment comes due. The Office of Financial Research estimated that more than $8 trillion in Treasury-backed repo was outstanding in August 2025.
The problem Broadridge targets is timing. A trading desk may hold billions in Treasuries, owe cash at 9am and expect an equally large receipt at 11am. Borrowing overnight to cover a two-hour gap is costly on very large sums. Broadridge's system, known as DLR, represents securities held in established custody as digital tokens, coordinating the transfer of collateral rights with confirmation of cash payment through conventional channels. The cash leg still runs through ordinary payment systems; the ledger tracks the securities and obligations.
Broadridge expanded DLR to securities from G7 markets in September. In a Broadridge-published white paper, Société Générale's Michael Walsh described eliminating spreadsheet work and almost $1 million in annual operating costs, and estimated daylight-overdraft charges had fallen to zero on four out of five days. Broadridge and consultancy Finadium modelled that if 15% of a bank's intraday funding used DLR, its required liquidity buffer could fall by an estimated 8% to 17% under their assumptions.
The technology has limits. Repo lenders advance less cash than the securities are worth, a cushion known as a haircut, and a wider haircut shrinks the loan regardless of how fast collateral moves. Nor does faster settlement replace central clearing, which the SEC will require for eligible cash Treasury transactions from December 31, 2026, with covered repo due by June 30, 2027. The Office of Financial Research found that about 46% of Treasury repo volume in its early-2026 observations was centrally cleared.
