HIFI, the stablecoin infrastructure company, DRW Cumberland and Marex have completed an onchain repurchase agreement on the Canton Network. The transaction settled both legs simultaneously, the cash leg and the U.S. Treasury collateral leg, in real time, with HIFI providing the cash side via USDC and USDCx, DRW supplying the Treasuries, and Marex acting as prime broker. The trade was executed through Tradeweb’s RFQ protocol, following the standard electronic dealer-to-client repo market structure.
The U.S. repo market averages $12.6 trillion in daily outstanding exposures, making it one of the largest and most systemically important funding markets in the world. It is also consistently ranked as the top candidate for tokenisation: many financial institutions name repo as their highest-priority tokenisation use case, ahead of OTC derivatives margining and securities lending. What has historically blocked onchain repo from institutional adoption is not technology; blockchain settlement for bilateral transactions has been technically feasible for years. The obstacle has been market structure. Institutional participants do not execute repo through novel pipelines; they use the frameworks they trust: competitive price discovery via RFQ, intermediation by a prime broker, and the legal certainty of established clearing relationships. This transaction replicates all three of those elements onchain for the first time.
The cash-leg flow in this transaction moved from fiat via real-time payments (RTP) into USDC, then into USDCx for settlement on Canton. At maturity, the flow reversed along the same path, automated end-to-end. That architecture eliminates the “fail risk” between legs that occurs in traditional repo when legs settle separately, and compresses the settlement window from the T+0 same-day end-of-day cycle that currently defines most repo markets to near-instantaneous atomic settlement.
For institutions outside the US time zone, particularly those in Asia and the Middle East, the implications are material. These institutions hold dollar assets and U.S. Treasuries, but operate in windows where U.S. markets are closed. Atomic onchain repo running on Canton’s 24/7 infrastructure allows them to access dollar funding and mobilise Treasury collateral outside conventional New York hours without the overnight funding gap that currently forces them to pre-fund or leave collateral idle. The transaction settles on Canton, described as a public, permissionless blockchain built specifically for institutional finance. Canton combines privacy with interoperability, payment flows, counterparty relationships and transaction amounts in this repo were not exposed to the network, a requirement that would make most institutional participants immediately reject a conventional public blockchain. The network has participation from major global financial institutions and governance facilitated by the Canton Foundation.
This is a proof-of-concept at institutional scale, not a live clearing migration. The next step that would signal genuine adoption is a standing facility — multiple transactions per day, multiple counterparty pairs — rather than one publicised demonstration trade. Watch for Tradeweb’s RFQ platform announcing expanded Canton integration, and for Marex as prime broker reporting additional onchain repo transactions into the clearing record. The SEC’s approved extended trading sessions for U.S. equity exchanges and the move of clearing infrastructure toward near-continuous operating hours are the structural tailwinds that give this architecture its policy alignment; any rulemaking from SIFMA or the SEC on clearing-house operating hours that explicitly contemplates 24/7 settlement will be an important accelerant.
