BNY Mellon plans to tokenize US Treasuries and move to 24/7 settlement

BNY Mellon, the world's largest custody bank, is preparing to begin test trading of tokenized U.S. Treasuries on its own private blockchain by the end of 2026, and to move to round-the-clock Treasury settlement by 2027, CoinDesk reports.

What's already happened

• BNY completed an after-hours trade involving reserves from two stablecoins — Ripple's RLUSD and OpenEden's USDO — after the Fedwire Securities system stopped processing for the day.
• Ripple participated directly, while BNY's cash-management unit Dreyfus acted for OpenEden; the trade settled via the Tradeweb platform.
• Both stablecoins hold short-dated U.S. government debt as reserves and trade continuously — exactly the mismatch with the Treasury market's normal operating hours that BNY is trying to close.

How big the market already is

The tokenized U.S. Treasuries market hit a record $15.35 billion in May 2026, according to CryptoNews — several times its size of under $1 billion in early 2024. For context, total outstanding U.S. debt exceeds $26 trillion.

Not the only such project

BNY already serves as primary custodian for RLUSD's reserves and provides custody and investment management for OpenEden's tokenized Treasury fund — so this builds on ground the bank already knows. Later in 2026, the bank plans to extend its settlement network to cover more of Asia's, Europe's, and the U.S.'s trading hours — gradually closing the weekend gap that leaves round-the-clock-trading stablecoins and tokenized funds stranded without access to the Treasuries backing them. We covered a separate Treasury-tokenization project on Stellar earlier, led by DTCC.

None of this should be read as personalized investment advice.