The Securities and Exchange Commission, the top American markets regulator, issued an order allowing certain tokenized stocks to trade in a new way. Tokenized stocks are shares of a company represented as digital tokens on a blockchain, a shared electronic ledger. The order covers what are known as NMS stocks, meaning ordinary exchange-listed shares, and permits them to change hands through automated market makers. An automated market maker is software that lets people buy and sell using pooled funds and set formulas rather than matching a human buyer to a human seller. Crucially, those venues will not need to register in the usual way to operate.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs and the bank Citizens said the change opens fresh business in three areas: custody, meaning the safekeeping of digital assets; the infrastructure that turns shares into tokens; and settlement using stablecoins, which are digital tokens pegged to a stable value such as the dollar. They said the shift gives brokers, the firms that execute trades for investors, room to expand their onchain product lines.
The analysts singled out three companies as positioned to benefit early. Coinbase and Robinhood are trading platforms, while Circle is a major issuer of stablecoins. As one industry description put it, the exemption hands traditional finance the instrument, the stock itself, and hands the crypto industry the venue where it trades.
For decades, stock trading in the United States has run through registered exchanges and brokers. Letting listed shares trade as tokens through automated software, without the usual registration, blurs the line between Wall Street and crypto markets and could reshape how ordinary investors buy and sell stocks.
The order is a narrow exemption, not a rewrite of the rules. It applies to specific listed stocks traded through automated market makers, and much of the value it promises depends on custody, tokenization plumbing and stablecoin settlement that still has to be built and adopted before any company sees real revenue.