The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is migrating traditional financial instruments onto public ledgers. The clearing institution, which clears $2.5 quadrillion in yearly global securities transactions, announced a direct partnership with the Stellar (XLM) network. They have scheduled the rollout of a digital asset tokenization platform for the first half of 2027.
As the DTCC confirmed plans to tokenize Russell 1000 stocks, ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries directly on the Stellar blockchain, XLM climbed to a four-month high. Retail capital transferred out of Ripple (XRP), currently down 29% year-to-date, exposing opposite market trends between the two interconnected digital assets.
What’s Behind the “Ripple Divergence”
Sharing the same founder, Jed McCaleb, XRP and Stellar are being compared by analysts who are currently discussing whether the former can replicate the latter’s recent price action. The underlying institutional utility of the two were initially the same but this has now officially split. The enduring price correlation between XLM and XRP finally cracked, as evident in recent market data, because of deep-rooted differences in how each protocol integrates with the DTCC.
In March 2026, Ripple was integrated with the DTCC. However, the relationship was only involved with the Ripple Prime brokerage unit entering the clearing system. The agreement did not mandate the direct use of the XRP token for blockchain settlements. Also, because of XRP’s $80 billion market capitalization, it requires exponentially more institutional capital to move its spot price compared to Stellar’s $7 billion market cap.
The Multiple-Chain Strategy of Wall Street
The integration of Stellar has generally been received by the retail market as a direct defeat for Ripple, with Stocktwits, a social sentiment tracker, reversing towards bearish metrics in favor of XRP. On the other hand, institutional strategists view the rollout differently because the DTCC’s approach depends on interoperability rather than a single-ledger monopoly.
The clearing firm initiated an institutional tokenization working group before selecting Stellar for this specific tokenization phase. Rather than directly replacing one asset with another, the DTCC is executing an interoperable multi-chain strategy that still includes Ripple’s ecosystem for separate institutional functions, as records indicate.
