A Second Company Asks the SEC for Permission to Run a Tokenized Stock Market

Perpetuals.com, a Nasdaq-listed company led by the former chief executive of FTX Europe, is seeking permission to operate a tokenized stock marketplace in the United States under the Securities and Exchange Commission's new exemption framework, CoinDesk reported. It is the second firm to pursue the route. The first was a joint venture between the exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange.

A tokenized stock is a blockchain-issued claim that tracks a listed share. Trading them in the United States runs into the fact that the share itself is a registered security and the venue that matches orders in it is normally required to register as a national securities exchange or an alternative trading system. The exemption framework is the SEC's answer to that: relief from specific requirements, granted case by case, with conditions attached, so a venue can run onchain settlement without first rebuilding itself as a conventional exchange.

Two applicants, two very different shapes

The contrast between the two is the interesting part. ICE is the operator of the NYSE and about as established as market infrastructure gets, and OKX brings the crypto exchange side. Perpetuals.com arrives from the other direction: a crypto-native derivatives business with a public listing, run by an executive whose previous post was at the European arm of a failed exchange. The same door is being tried by the incumbent and by the challenger at roughly the same time.

That matters because the conditions the SEC attaches to the first approvals will set the template. Exemptive relief is not legislation. It is granted to a named applicant on named terms, and the terms tend to be copied into the next application. Whoever clears first effectively drafts the operating rules for everyone behind them.

Why firms are queueing now

The commercial case has been building in public. Tokenized equities, counted across the chains where they trade, are worth close to $3.3bn, Cointelegraph reported this week, and much of the trading in them happens outside American market hours. Non-US venues have taken that business because they could. A US venue operating under an SEC exemption would be the first to offer the same round-the-clock access to American investors without routing them offshore.

What is not yet public is what either applicant has actually asked for: which stocks, what settlement finality, who holds the underlying shares, and whether retail gets access on day one. Exemption applications are negotiated, and the detail that decides whether a venue is useful tends to appear only in the final order.

What is still missing

Nothing here is approved. Both applications are pending, and the SEC has not said when it will rule on either. The agency is also short of commissioners, and Cointelegraph has noted that a change to its quorum rules makes it easier for a thinly staffed commission to act, which cuts both ways: faster decisions, with fewer people signing them.

For now the count is two. One is backed by the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. The other is a Nasdaq-listed crypto firm. If a third arrives before either is decided, the queue itself becomes the story.