After money itself, corporate equity may be the most natural asset to migrate on-chain.

Stocks are already ledger entries. Because corporate equity is inherently digital, ownership is simply a record maintained by a regulated intermediary. Moving them to a blockchain does not require oracles, IoT bridges, or physical verification. It simply replaces one ledger with another.

And yet, this transition has always faced a critical structural constraint: legal finality. While a blockchain transaction is technically irreversible, it does not confer enforceable shareholder rights in the off-chain world.

Have Blockchains Been Legally Cleared in the U.S.?

In May 2025, the SEC's Division of Trading and Markets issued a critical set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) regarding crypto asset activities. Among other regulatory clarifications, this guidance confirmed that distributed ledger technology is a permissible infrastructure for maintaining official equity records.

Following this, in January 2026, the SEC's Divisions of Corporation Finance, Investment Management, and Trading and Markets issued a joint staff statement. This unified policy elevated the foundational 2025 views into a comprehensive market framework, clarifying exactly how tokenized securities fit within existing federal securities laws.

The key operational takeaway was that tokenized shares are legally equivalent to traditional stock: issuers and transfer agents can seamlessly integrate distributed ledger technology directly into their master securityholder files without altering the asset's underlying legal status.

The practical consequence is massive. In the United States, on-chain records can now officially serve as the legally recognized securityholder file. Blockchain is no longer relegated to parallel, informational infrastructure—it can actively function as the official corporate cap table.

The Market is Already Moving

Even before the SEC's sweeping January clarification, industry players in the US began testing the limits of the new technology.

Superstate and Galaxy Digital

On September 3, 2025, Galaxy Digital ($GLXY) partnered with Superstate to become the first Nasdaq-listed company to tokenize its SEC-registered Class A common stock directly on the public Solana blockchain.

This was a pure, "bottom-up" experiment. Rather than creating synthetic derivatives or locking shares in a centralized vault, Galaxy executed a direct issuance where the token is the legally recognized share. While still an early-stage proof of concept, it has proven the viability of the model: recent on-chain metrics show the tokenized $GLXY pool actively circulating among verified holders, recently processing nearly $2 million in monthly transfer volume natively on-chain.

Since 2024, Superstate has been developing its "Opening Bell" platform, which allows public companies to natively issue equity on major blockchains. In January 2026 the company raised $82.5m Series B funding for it.

Securitize

Securitize is arguably the most entrenched and vertically integrated heavyweight in the space. They do much more than simply act as a transfer agent; they operate a sprawling, SEC-registered ecosystem that includes a broker-dealer and an Alternative Trading System (ATS). They also have a significant head start, having proven the native-issuance model back in 2024 when Exodus Movement (NYSE: EXOD) used their infrastructure to issue equity directly on-chain.

Recently, Securitize has aggressively expanded its roster of traditional public companies. In October 2025, they partnered with FG Nexus (FGNX) to natively tokenize its Nasdaq-listed shares on the Ethereum blockchain. This was a landmark move, as it included the tokenization of FG Nexus's perpetual preferred equity (FGNXP), making it the first U.S. exchange-listed company to bring a dividend-paying stock fully on-chain. Through Securitize's regulated infrastructure, cash distributions can now flow directly into token holders' self-custodial wallets via smart contracts, instantly eliminating traditional latency and intermediary costs.

Capitalizing on the SEC’s January 2026 guidance—which permanently validated this exact architecture—Securitize is now rolling out "Stocks on Securitize" platform in Q1 2026. This platform introduces the first fully compliant, 24/7 on-chain trading experience for natively tokenized public equities.

Crucially, the platform is expected to bridge Web3 mechanics with traditional market integrity: during Market Hours the trades are executed in strict compliance with the SEC’s rules while when traditional markets close, Securitize's smart contracts pivot to an Automated Market Maker (AMM) pricing mechanism—similar to a decentralized exchange—adjusting prices based on real-time on-chain demand to facilitate continuous 24/7 trading.

Depository Trust Company

The Depository Trust Company (DTC)—the current near-monopoly clearing and settlement utility for U.S. securities markets—recognized the existential threat of public companies bypassing their centralized ledger. Consequently, they aggressively pursued their own regulatory cover.

On December 11, 2025, the DTC successfully secured a No-Action Letter from the SEC. This authorized a controlled, three-year pilot program (slated to roll out in the second half of 2026) allowing the DTC to tokenize highly liquid assets, including the Russell 1000 and major U.S. Treasuries.

The regulatory preferences and the industry's inertia provides a massive competitive advantage for the legacy monopoly. It allows institutional incumbents to capture the core benefits of blockchain—such as 24/7 mobility, programmable collateral, and fractionalization—without forcing them to abandon the trusted, centralized custody structures they have relied on for decades.

The SEC's letter prescribes DTC to choose the list of "allowed" blockchains that the company has yet to publish. Some of them have already been mentioned in the media:

  • Ethereum ( Considered the leading candidate for RWA tokenization, with significant market share, also DTCC own purpose built blockchain is EVM compatible)
  • Hedera, XRP and Stellar among the contenders
  • Canton (officially announced partnership
  • Chainlink and DTCC' own ComposerX LedgerScan and Factory are mentioned.

Whats Next?

While the regulatory validation of public blockchains is a massive and highly plausible step forward for the industry, the current hybrid model is only a transitional phase.

Distributed ledger technology was designed from the ground up to be a self-supporting, trustless environment. It solves the "double-spend" problem natively at the protocol level through cryptographic consensus, rendering centralized off-chain reconciliation—like the redundant oversight layers mandated in the DTC’s pilot program—technologically obsolete.

The real value of tokenized equity will only be unlocked when this legacy infrastructure ceases to exist entirely. Maintaining parallel ledgers introduces unnecessary friction and reconciliation costs. Fully deprecating the old plumbing removes rent-seeking intermediaries, enables true atomic settlement, and allows corporate equity to seamlessly integrate into decentralized finance ecosystems, unlocking programmable collateral and continuous, frictionless liquidity without a centralized bottleneck.

Share this article
The link has been copied!