Clear Street, a regulated financial infrastructure firm based in New York, has joined the XDC Network as an institutional-grade Masternode Validator, taking on block validation, ledger maintenance and network governance duties on the Layer-1 blockchain. The move places a Wall Street-adjacent firm in the consensus layer of a network built for trade finance and real-world asset tokenization. Clear Street serves more than 700 institutional clients, holds customer balances of about $16 billion, processes roughly 550 million shares a day worth around $28.4 billion in notional value, employs about 800 people and has raised about $1 billion in capital. XDC Network co-founder Ritesh Kakkad said the addition supports the network’s effort to deepen its presence in the United States. XDC describes itself as an open-source, EVM-compatible Layer-1 blockchain that runs on XDPoS 2.0, a delegated proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. Its validator roster also includes Animoca Brands, which joined on May 19, 2026, Republic, which joined earlier in May, as well as Deutsche Telekom, SBI Holdings, HashKeyCloud and UOB Venture Management. The announcement underscores a broader institutional adoption argument: regulated financial firms operating validator infrastructure can make blockchain networks appear more credible to compliance teams assessing them for settlement and other financial use cases.