A system and method for reducing message traffic during two phase commitment in a distributed transaction processing system. Transactional objects manage transactions in a distributed system. A coordinator object is responsible for ensuring data consistency by enforcing atomic transaction changes. Any change to one or more resources by a transaction is either made at all or none of the resources. Distributed transactions use interposition to create subordinate coordinator for domains other than the primary domain. Each subordinate coordinator controls transaction commitment of all resources within that domain via a single message sequence per coordinator. Dynamic registration of subordinate coordinator resources ensures that the subordinate coordinator is not added to the commit tree of the root coordinator unless it has recoverable resources. Dynamic registration minimizes the size of the commit tree thereby minimizing the number of messages transmitted during commitment processing.