What It Takes to Run Capital Markets Onchain

Tokenization has moved faster than the infrastructure designed to support it. As financial assets increasingly move onchain, issuing a token is no longer the hard part. The real challenge is running institutional capital markets onchain: coordinating settlement, custody, collateral management, and payment flows across many regulated participants.

Atlas is Anchorage Digital’s institutional settlement network, built to meet that challenge. It enables institutions to settle digital assets and fiat currency onchain while maintaining the controls, governance, and auditability required for capital markets activity. Critically, Atlas also supports real-time collateral monitoring and management, helping ensure secured portfolios remain appropriately collateralized as markets move.

Atlas goes beyond simple transfers. It is built for complex, multi-party transactions where trustees, custodians, intermediaries, and agents operate together within clearly defined roles. In this environment, collateral risk must be actively managed, not periodically reconciled.

That infrastructure is already being used in practice.

Galaxy Digital recently issued its first tokenized CLO (“collateralized loan obligation”) bringing crypto-backed private credit onchain – with Atlas powering the transaction’s end-to-end settlement, payment waterfall calculation, and collateral management and more.

Tokenized credit raises the expectations of infrastructure
CLOs and private credit are among the most operationally complex structures in traditional finance. They rely on strict waterfall mechanics, ongoing collateral oversight, and coordination across many intermediaries. When these structures move onchain, expectations increase further: collateral can move 24/7, transparency is higher, and operational risk must be managed in real time.

This challenge is amplified when underlying loans are secured by digital assets issued natively on different blockchains. In these cases, off-chain collateral management and monitoring play a critical role in maintaining institutional standards.

Atlas addresses this by continuously monitoring collateral balances using blockchain data and configurable pricing sources, enabling automated oversight and faster risk response– functionality that is difficult to achieve with smart-contract-only solutions.

Blockchain rails alone are not enough. Institutional credit requires infrastructure that can coordinate settlement, payments, and collateral management dependably and at scale.

Galaxy’s first tokenized CLO
Galaxy’s issuance of its first tokenized CLO illustrates how tokenized credit can be brought onchain responsibly. By tokenizing the CLO, Galaxy improves investor access and transparency while retaining the familiar structure and safeguards of traditional capital markets.

The transaction reflects Galaxy’s broader strategy to evolve its lending and asset management capabilities through the debt capital markets, using tokenization to enhance, rather than replace, traditional frameworks.

Executing a structure like this requires infrastructure capable of supporting the full lifecycle of a complex credit product, including continuous collateral oversight.

Atlas Powers The Transaction 
Traditional finance often relies on fragmented processes, internal ledgers, and manual coordination across many parties. Fully decentralized crypto-native approaches often push complexity into smart contracts that don’t scale to institutional requirements. Galaxy’s tokenized CLO required a different model: a shared settlement and collateral management layer that allows regulated roles to operate onchain with control, governance, and accountability.

Atlas provides that layer. 

For Galaxy’s tokenized CLO, Atlas powers core settlement and coordination flows end to end, synchronizing trustees, custodians, intermediaries, and other participants within a shared, auditable framework. It enables collateral, payments, and value to move onchain with precision and speed, while also supporting portfolio-level collateral monitoring and risk metrics that allow for timely corrective action as market conditions change.

The Future of Onchain Institutional Markets 
As tokenized finance and institutional participation accelerate, the constraint will not be token design–it will be infrastructure. Markets scale when systems can handle real-world complexity efficiently, transparently, and continuously.

Atlas was built for that purpose, providing a foundation for tokenized credit, private markets, and future onchain capital markets.

Galaxy’s tokenized CLO demonstrates what becomes possible when tokenized assets are paired with institutional-grade settlement from day one.

To learn more about Atlas, please get in touch.