The DTCC and its subsidiaries are the post-trade infrastructure of U.S. capital markets. Sentry is meant to replace it with a single programmable ledger that is itself the authoritative record of ownership — eliminating the chain of inter-institutional reconciliations the existing system was built to coordinate.

The first job is clearing. When you buy 100 shares of Apple, your trade routes to the National Securities Clearing Corporation, which steps between you and the seller as central counterparty. NSCC accepts both legs, computes the obligations, and tells participants what they owe. Sentry does the same job in consensus — the protocol itself plays the role of the central counterparty, and validators enforce the obligation. The trade still has two sides; the intermediary is just a piece of software that every validator runs.

The second job is custody. Almost every share of every public U.S. company is registered in the name of Cede & Co., the nominee of the Depository Trust Company. When you “own Apple stock,” what you actually hold is a beneficial interest in a position that the DTC records on its books — your broker holds an interest at the DTC, you hold an interest at your broker, and the chain settles upward. Sentry replaces this layer with native ownership at issuance: the token is the security, recorded directly on the protocol, with no nominee in between.

The third job is netting. The DTCC clears roughly $2.15 quadrillion a year in trade volume but settles only on net positions — which is what allows the entire U.S. equity market to operate on $103 billion of clearing-fund deposits. Sentry offers exactly this to qualified participants in the form of epoch-based settlement: obligations accumulate during a window, the protocol nets them against each other, and only the net positions clear at the close. Anyone who wants atomic gross settlement can still have it; the netting tier sits alongside it, not in place of it.

The fourth job is transfer agency. Moving an equity position between brokerages today takes about six business days through ACATS, an interbank batch process designed in the late 1980s. On Sentry, a transfer is a single state transition. The cap table is the protocol; the brokerage is a UI on top of it.

What changes in practice: clearing happens at the speed of consensus rather than at T+1. Capital that today sits idle at the DTCC waiting for settlement can be redeployed. New asset classes — tokenized treasuries, private securities, derivatives — ride the same rails as public equities, because the rails are software, not regulated intermediaries. And the margin between participants and the system shrinks: the protocol does the same job the DTCC does, but you can read its source code.