Perpetuals.com seeks SEC exemption for U.S. tokenized stock trading

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Perpetuals SEC exemption for tokenized stocks

Highlights

Perpetuals.com filed for a five-year SEC innovation exemption to operate a U.S. tokenized securities venue granting full shareholder rights on public blockchains.
Initial trading will occur via permissioned AMM pools on Kronos X Public blockchain, with tokenized stocks paired against a digital asset expected to be USDC, possible launch after mid-November.
Perpetuals.com reported $65.2 million in total assets and a $17.6 million net loss at April fiscal year-end, entering a sector where OKXICE also seeks SEC exemption for tokenized stocks trading.

Filing outlines market structure and launch path

As reported by CoinDesk, Nasdaq-listed Perpetuals.com filed a notice on Wednesday saying it plans to operate a tokenized securities venue under the SEC's five-year innovation exemption. The framework, introduced in September, allows certain marketplaces to trade U.S. stocks on public blockchains without registering as traditional securities exchanges, while requiring tokenized shares to carry the same shareholder rights as ordinary stock, including dividends and voting rights.

The company says its U.S. marketplace will be run by Kephas Corporation, a Delaware-based subsidiary. Trading is set to take place through permissioned automated market maker liquidity pools, initially on Kronos X Public, an Ethereum-compatible layer-2 blockchain developed by the company, with tokenized stocks paired against a digital asset expected at first to be a form of USDC.

Perpetuals.com has not set a firm launch date. Trading could begin in mid-November at the earliest after the required 30-day notice period, subject to market-data and compliance arrangements, smart-contract security reviews and other preparations, and the company says it plans to publish updated disclosures, including live smart-contract addresses, before launch.

Sector competition and regulatory context

Perpetuals.com follows OKXICE, a joint venture between OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, which filed plans last week for around-the-clock trading in more than 60 tokenized U.S. stocks. The SEC exemption also gives listed companies 30 days to object to having their shares traded on a tokenized securities venue.

The filing marks a return to tokenized equities for chief executive Patrick Gruhn and his team, who helped develop some of the earliest stock-linked tokens offered by crypto exchanges including Binance and FTX in 2021. Gruhn co-founded Swiss tokenization company Digital Assets AG, which worked with German investment firm CM-Equity on digital tokens linked to shares such as Tesla and Coinbase before the business was acquired by FTX Group and became part of FTX Europe, which he led before the group's collapse in November 2022.

Those earlier products differed from the new SEC model because they mainly gave price exposure rather than full shareholder rights. Binance ended its stock-token offering in July 2021 amid regulatory scrutiny, including concerns from Germany's BaFin over the lack of a published securities prospectus.

Perpetuals.com already provides trading technology for Perpetual Markets MTF, a Cyprus-based marketplace licensed under Europe's MiFID II framework and authorized under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation in August. The company reported $65.2 million in total assets at the end of April and a net loss of $17.6 million for its fiscal year.

In our earlier article on Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev’s vision for AI agents in trading, we explored how autonomous systems could execute retail trades around the clock while investors shift into a supervisory “agent manager” role. We also noted that this model could raise the risk profile compared with traditional passive-income approaches, even as it potentially drives higher trading activity on consumer platforms.

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