Morgan Stanley Pushes Trajectory Cross Tokenized Equities Launch to Q1 2027
Oct. 13, 2026 • Article • Digital Assets
Morgan Stanley has moved its target for introducing tokenized equities on its Trajectory Cross alternative trading system from the second half of 2026 to the first quarter of 2027. Amy Oldenburg, the bank’s head of digital asset strategy, cited limited issuance of tokenized shares by third parties and nascent client demand. The securities would trade alongside traditional equities, exchange-traded funds and American Depositary Receipts on the existing venue, rather than on a separate crypto exchange.
The bank is developing client-facing custodial wallet infrastructure and testing how conventional and tokenized instruments can be handled together. A planned tokenization service from the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation and forthcoming US stablecoin regulations provide context for the revised timetable, but neither guarantees securities for the venue to trade. Tokenized equities represented about $3.15 billion of the roughly $39 billion on-chain real-world asset market in October 2026, illustrating why growth in tokenization does not necessarily mean more equities are available to trade.
Morgan Stanley has pushed its target for introducing tokenized equities on its Trajectory Cross alternative trading system to the first quarter of 2027, citing a shortage of products to trade and nascent client demand. The plan would place the securities alongside conventional instruments on an existing trading venue, rather than on a standalone cryptocurrency exchange.
Amy Oldenburg, Morgan Stanley’s head of digital asset strategy, disclosed the revised window during an interview at TOKEN2049 in Singapore on October 12, 2026. She had previously outlined a launch in the second half of 2026 at the Digital Asset Summit in March. The change shows that building a venue is only part of the task: tokenized shares must also be issued before the system can match orders in them.
An Existing Venue for a New Instrument
Morgan Stanley intends to integrate tokenized equities into Trajectory Cross, also known as ATS-1. The alternative trading system already handles traditional equities, exchange-traded funds and American Depositary Receipts. An alternative trading system is a venue for matching trades outside a conventional stock exchange; it does not create the securities traded there.
That distinction matters to the revised timetable. Morgan Stanley needs third-party market participants to issue tokenized equity securities before Trajectory Cross can provide crossing and execution liquidity. Oldenburg identified the limited supply of those products, together with early-stage client demand, as the primary reasons for postponing the rollout. The Q1 2027 date remains a target, not evidence that sufficient products will be available by then.
Trajectory Cross matches conditional algorithmic orders at a volume-weighted average price, or VWAP, over configured time intervals. VWAP reflects prices weighted by the amount traded. The matching design is intended to mitigate market impact and adverse selection—the risk of trading at an unfavorable price when other participants have better information. Under Morgan Stanley’s plan, tokenized equities would enter that established trading framework rather than require a separate crypto-focused venue.
Custody and Settlement Work
Morgan Stanley is also developing proprietary, client-facing custodial wallet infrastructure and testing how traditional and tokenized instruments can be handled together in its Digital Asset Lab. Those efforts address a different part of the workflow from matching trades: clients and the bank need a way to hold and manage the instruments the venue is intended to trade.
Outside the bank, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation is slated to launch a tokenization service at the end of October 2026. Its settlement rails are anticipated to help facilitate Wall Street trading in tokenized equities. Federal regulations under the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins, or GENIUS, Act are scheduled to take effect in January 2027, ahead of Morgan Stanley’s revised target.
Those scheduled developments provide context for the bank’s timing, but they do not remove the constraint Oldenburg identified. Settlement infrastructure and digital-asset rules cannot, on their own, supply tokenized shares for an alternative trading system to match.
Equity Supply Lags the Broader Tokenization Market
The on-chain real-world asset market was valued at roughly $39 billion in October 2026. Tokenized equities accounted for approximately $3.15 billion, while tokenized U.S. Treasuries represented about $14.6 billion—more than a third of the total. The comparison illustrates why a growing overall market does not necessarily translate into a deep pool of tokenized equity products.
Longer-term estimates also differ within Morgan Stanley. Oldenburg has publicly forecast a tokenized real-world asset market of between $3 trillion and $10 trillion by 2030. A September 2026 Morgan Stanley Research report set a lower base-case forecast of $2.3 trillion for the same year. Both projections concern the broader real-world asset market, not a guaranteed volume of equities available on Trajectory Cross.
For the planned rollout, the nearer-term measures are more concrete: third-party issuance, client demand and the bank’s progress on custody and trading integration. Morgan Stanley has set a new window for bringing tokenized equities onto its existing system, but the availability of securities to trade remains outside the venue’s control.
Mastercard and Visa are extending stablecoin technology into the systems that settle card payments between financial institutions, while leaving the consumer checkout experience largely unchanged. Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK in August 2026 and has expanded its network’s settlement options to include regulated stablecoins. Visa, meanwhile, is working with Stripe-owned Bridge and Lead Bank on on-chain settlement for card programs. The shift became more concrete in September, when SoFi Bank moved its credit and debit card issuing portfolio to live settlement using its bank-issued SoFiUSD. That portfolio represents more than $25 billion in annualized card volume, a measure distinct from the value settled in stablecoins. Visa separately reported an annualized stablecoin settlement run rate exceeding $25 billion in October. The networks’ initiatives target the back-end movement and reconciliation of funds, including periods when traditional bank settlement rails are unavailable; they do not require merchants to accept cryptocurrency.
The European Central Bank has launched Pontes, a bridge connecting tokenised-asset platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services for wholesale settlement in central bank money. The arrangement enables atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement, in which an asset and its payment move together. It does not yet make wholesale settlement available around the clock: Pontes depends on T2 operating hours and requires tokenised central bank money balances to be defunded at the end of the day. ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone says the Eurosystem plans to extend Pontes operating hours substantially by mid-2027 and reach 24/7/365 availability in 2028. Separately, the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá has tested cross-border payments using a shared programmable ledger that brings tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves into a single settlement process. Both initiatives address delays and liquidity demands in wholesale payments, but neither makes continuous, cross-border settlement available today.
Project Agorá’s real-value testing settled 30 live, multi-currency transactions worth approximately CHF 800,000, with atomic settlement averaging about 80 seconds. The tests involved 28 commercial institutions and five central banks. The result shows how tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves could support faster cross-border settlement, though it does not establish that settlement latency has been eliminated. The project’s prototype found that tokenisation did not change the legal character or regulatory obligations of deposits and reserves. Its design also let participating institutions conduct compliance checks concurrently. Seven more commercial banks joined in September 2026, taking private-sector participation to nearly 50 institutions. At Sibos in October, banking executives described the testing pipeline as a step towards production trials alongside the European Central Bank’s Pontes platform. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York did not participate in the live test transactions, an important qualification for the US dollar tests.
Ripple’s final federal trust bank charter, a Moody’s investment-grade rating for RLUSD and a planned expansion of the stablecoin’s availability on Coinbase have strengthened its position as a regulated digital dollar. Coinbase said Global Exchange access, including eligibility to use RLUSD as trading collateral, will follow its initial retail and prime rollout. Moody’s assigned RLUSD an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term rating, the first investment-grade rating it has given a stablecoin. The distinctions behind those developments matter. Ripple National Trust Bank manages RLUSD’s reserve collateral, but the legal issuer remains Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-regulated Ripple subsidiary. The national trust bank is uninsured and cannot take commercial retail deposits or extend credit. Moody’s also noted that holders do not currently own the underlying reserves directly and that statutory bankruptcy protections depend on implementation of the GENIUS Act, whose rules take effect in January 2027.
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement shows how stablecoins can be incorporated into familiar payment workflows without requiring businesses to fund every transaction with digital assets. The economics depend on more than the cost of moving a token on-chain. Stripe charges merchants 1.5% for stablecoin checkout transactions, versus its standard card-processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30; neither figure establishes the price of Ramp’s bill-payment service. Businesses receiving fiat may also face foreign-exchange and off-ramp costs, typically 0.3% to 2.0% when converting into local banking systems. Domestic clearing networks and compliance checks remain part of end-to-end delivery. Bridge’s issuance and transfer tools, alongside its conditional U.S. trust-bank approval, illustrate the infrastructure behind those payments—but not the elimination of every payment cost.
StraitsX has opened onboarding for digital payment token providers across more than 100 markets through an expanded card-issuing architecture developed with Visa. Integration documentation published on 26 October 2026 describes a multi-BIN model that combines issuing sponsorship, transaction authorization, compliance screening and fiat clearing. The approach lets participating providers build stablecoin-backed card products while merchants continue to receive conventional fiat payments through Visa’s network. StraitsX says its card gross transaction value rose 40-fold year on year from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025, while cards issued across Asia increased 83-fold. On-chain issuer telemetry recorded monthly card transaction volume of $310 million to $438 million through October 2026. The company’s stated $6 billion annualized card transaction figure is distinct from its cumulative $70 billion in processed stablecoin volume. StraitsX and Visa have also scheduled demonstrations of agentic payments for November 2026.