Perpetuals.com has filed notice to launch a U.S. marketplace for tokenized securities under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new five-year “innovation exemption,” positioning the Nasdaq-listed company as the second applicant under the framework.

The planned venue would let eligible investors trade tokenized U.S. stocks on a public blockchain without the operator registering as a traditional securities exchange, if the proposal moves ahead. Perpetuals said trading could start as early as mid-November, but only after the required waiting period and further compliance, market-data and security work are completed.

Second filing under the SEC’s new framework

The filing, made Wednesday, follows a submission last week by OKX-ICE, a joint venture between crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. That venture said it planned round-the-clock trading in more than 60 tokenized U.S. stocks.

The SEC introduced the exemption in September. It allows certain marketplaces to offer trading in U.S. stocks on public blockchains without registering as traditional securities exchanges, while setting conditions for how those tokenized securities must function.

Among those conditions, the tokens are expected to carry the same shareholder rights as ordinary shares, including dividend and voting rights. Public companies are also given 30 days to object to their shares being made available on a tokenized securities venue.

Gruhn’s return to stock tokenization

The application also marks a return to tokenized equities for CEO Patrick Gruhn and colleagues who previously worked on some of the early stock-linked token products offered by crypto exchanges in 2021.

Gruhn co-founded Swiss tokenization firm Digital Assets AG, which worked with German investment firm CM-Equity on digital tokens tied to shares such as Tesla and Coinbase. That business was later acquired by FTX Group and became part of FTX Europe, which Gruhn led before the group’s collapse in November 2022.

Those earlier products were not the same as the securities contemplated by the SEC’s new exemption. Binance’s stock tokens, for example, gave users price exposure to the underlying shares but did not include voting rights. Binance ended that offering in July 2021 amid regulatory scrutiny, including concerns raised by Germany’s BaFin over the absence of a published securities prospectus.

How the proposed venue would operate

According to the public notice, the U.S. marketplace would be operated by Kephas Corporation, a Delaware-based subsidiary of Perpetuals.com. Trading is planned through permissioned automated market maker liquidity pools rather than a conventional exchange order book.

The company said the pools would initially run on Kronos X Public, its Ethereum-compatible layer-2 blockchain. Each pool would pair a tokenized U.S. stock with a digital asset, initially expected to be a form of USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Circle.

Perpetuals said it will publish updated disclosures before trading begins, including live smart-contract addresses. It has not given a fixed launch date.

Existing business and next steps

Perpetuals already supplies trading technology to Perpetual Markets MTF, a Cyprus-based marketplace licensed under Europe’s MiFID II framework. That venue also received authorization under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation in August.

The company reported total assets of $65.2 million at the end of April and a net loss of $17.6 million for its fiscal year. Earlier this year, it also announced an agreement with Datavault AI to support trading infrastructure for planned tokenized commodity offerings involving copper, gold and other physical assets, with more than $300 million in targeted issuance.

For the U.S. stock venue, the next confirmed milestone is the end of the 30-day period following the public notice. Perpetuals said any mid-November start would still depend on finalizing market-data and compliance arrangements, completing smart-contract security reviews and finishing other operational preparations.

Source: www.coindesk.com