The first of International Capital Markets Association’s (ICMA) two-part report on repos found that distributed ledger technology (DLT) is unlikely to replace central clearing or central‑limit order books in the repo market.
However, the technology is positioned to deliver meaningful efficiency gains in settlement, collateral mobility and intraday liquidity.
The report highlights settlement and collateral management as the areas where DLT can deliver the earliest benefits, citing the potential for “near‑instantaneous or event‑driven and fully‑automated” processes that reduce delays, errors and operational risk.
The first part found that while the legal and functional nature of repo is unchanged by tokenisation, DLT is set to “transform the infrastructure of the repo and other financial markets” by enhancing or replacing existing post‑trade systems.”
The report catalogues 34 publicised DLT repo tests and transactions between 2017 and 2025, noting that most were proofs‑of‑concept, pilots or simulations. Only two platforms — Broadridge’s DLR and JP Morgan’s Kinexys — have seen regular commercial use.
ICMA says what is often described as a DLT repo market was, by the end of 2025, “almost entirely composed of these two distinct and isolated pools of activity”.
Turnover on DLR accelerated sharply in the second half of 2025, driven by sponsored repo flows from European banks. Kinexys reported $2bn in daily turnover in April 2025, with its joint venture with HQLAX initially adding up to $1bn a day.
By the end of 2025, it is estimated that the total average daily turnover on these two platforms may have reached, and possibly exceeded, US$3.7 billion per day, mainly on DLR.
The report infers that average daily turnover on Kinexys since mid‑2023 has been around $3.7bn, consistent with the platform’s reported cumulative volumes.
By contrast, the cumulative turnover of all other DLT repo activity over the nine‑year period — excluding DLR and Kinexys — is unlikely to have exceeded $300m, with much of it experimental or involving simulated settlement.
The report concluded that central limit orderbooks trading and central clearing are inherently unsuitable for DLT, with decentralised alternatives to CCPs facing “fundamental legal objections”.
As a result, the report finds that DLT’s impact will be concentrated in OTC trading and post‑trade processing rather than in the core matching and clearing functions of the repo market.
Despite these limits, the report takes a constructive view of the technology’s trajectory, pointing to the potential for DLT to support new use‑cases such as intraday repo, more efficient mobilisation of collateral across fragmented balance sheets, and integrated trading‑settlement workflows.
“There is little doubt that DLT will transform the infrastructure of the repo and other financial markets,” the report says, even if the horizon for full‑scale adoption “is still some way off”.
Part two of the study, due in the summer, will examine how a DLT‑based settlement architecture could evolve and how far it may reshape the repo market’s underlying plumbing.
