Blockchain.com and NYSE Group have signed an agreement to explore giving eligible users access to tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs through the exchange’s planned 24/7 digital trading venue.

According to Blockchain.com’s Sep. 23 announcement, the companies signed a memorandum of understanding covering distribution of tokenized U.S. exchange-listed shares and exchange-traded funds. Eligible Blockchain.com customers would access the products through a digital alternative trading system, or ATS, that NYSE has yet to launch. The arrangement remains subject to required regulatory approvals.

The companies did not identify the countries where access would be offered or set a launch date. Blockchain.com operates in more than 70 jurisdictions, according to its announcement, but eligibility would depend on the rules governing the products and the markets where they are offered. Its agreement with NYSE outlines a proposed distribution route rather than an available trading service.

Blockchain.com could connect users to NYSE’s planned venue

NYSE first outlined its digital platform in January and said it was still developing onchain settlement infrastructure in August. The exchange plans to support trading at any hour, orders for fractions of a share and settlement using blockchain-based systems. It has also described stablecoin-based funding and orders placed in dollar amounts.

Under the proposed agreement, Blockchain.com would provide a route for its customers to reach the NYSE venue once it is operating and the necessary approvals are in place. NYSE’s January plan calls for a separate digital market that combines its Pillar matching engine with blockchain-based systems used after a trade. The exchange said its design can support multiple networks for settlement and custody.

NYSE also said the venue could handle both tokenized versions of traditionally issued securities and securities issued in tokenized form from the start. Its plan calls for tokenized shareholders to retain conventional dividend and governance rights. Access to the venue would run through qualified broker-dealers under the model described by the exchange.

Blockchain.com Executive Chairman and CEO Peter Smith said a connection to the venue could extend tokenized stock access to users across the company’s international network. NYSE Group President Lynn Martin described Blockchain.com’s customer reach and digital asset operations as a fit for the exchange’s planned platform. Neither executive announced that trading had begun.

US stock tokens bring shareholder rights into focus

For U.S. readers, the proposal concerns shares and ETFs listed on American exchanges, even though the companies have framed Blockchain.com’s customer network as international. A token tied to a U.S. stock does not necessarily carry the same legal rights as the share itself. The product’s structure determines what its holder owns and whether the holder can receive dividends, vote, or claim an interest in the underlying shares.

In September, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission set out conditions for tokenized stocks traded by qualifying venues under a five-year exemption. The SEC said eligible tokenized National Market System stocks must preserve the rights attached to the corresponding conventional shares. Products that only track a stock’s price do not qualify under that exemption. The agency’s action provides context for U.S. tokenized stock trading, but Blockchain.com and NYSE have not said that their proposed arrangement has received approval under it.

NYSE has taken another, separate step involving its existing exchange. An April SEC filing on tokenized trading established rules for eligible securities to trade in tokenized form alongside conventional shares during a Depository Trust Company pilot. Coverage of the filing noted that trades under that arrangement continue to settle on the usual next-business-day schedule. NYSE’s proposed 24/7 venue is a different project, designed for immediate settlement and still awaiting regulatory approvals.

Existing Ondo products show a different route to access

Blockchain.com already offers stock-linked tokens in some markets through Ondo Finance. In February, the companies expanded tokenized stock access to eligible users in 30 European Economic Area countries, with more than 200 U.S. stocks and ETFs available through the Blockchain.com DeFi wallet. Blockchain.com said it had previously introduced Ondo products to users in parts of Africa and South America.

According to Blockchain.com, its Ondo-linked tokens track the returns of the underlying assets, including price moves and reinvested dividends after applicable taxes. The structure of an existing Ondo product should therefore be considered separately from NYSE’s plan for a regulated digital venue. Blockchain.com’s Sep. 23 announcement describes a potential connection to that future venue; it does not say that the two sets of products would have identical ownership terms.

Blockchain.com’s geographic expansion has also included a regulatory step in Nigeria. The company announced its admission to the Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission’s Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme, a supervised route for eligible digital asset businesses. Its Sep. 23 agreement with NYSE does not name Nigeria, Europe or any other region as a confirmed market for the proposed service.

ICE and Blockchain.com also plan to exchange market data

Beyond trading access, the memorandum covers distribution of data in both directions. ICE Data Services, part of NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange, plans to provide Blockchain.com’s crypto market data and analytics to its subscribing clients. Blockchain.com, in turn, plans to add selected ICE and NYSE exchange data feeds to its app.

Blockchain.com said the app integration would give its more than 44 million confirmed accounts access to real-time stock information. The announcement also listed more than 95 million wallets created since the company’s founding; that figure is distinct from its count of confirmed accounts.

Blockchain.com and the New York Stock Exchange have signed a memorandum of understanding to give Blockchain.com users access to tokenized US-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds through NYSE’s planned digital trading platform.

Under the proposed arrangement, Blockchain.com would distribute tokenized US equities and ETFs traded on NYSE’s digital alternative trading system (ATS), subject to regulatory approval. The deal would extend NYSE’s planned tokenized securities offering to Blockchain.com’s global customer base.

The agreement also covers an exchange of market data. NYSE affiliate ICE Data Services plans to distribute Blockchain.com’s crypto market data and analytics to its clients, while Blockchain.com would add certain ICE and NYSE market data feeds to its platform.

Reid Noch, vice president of US equity market structure at TD Securities, told Cointelegraph that NYSE’s planned tokenized ATS appears “primarily like a play for retail flow,” pointing to its planned 24/7 trading and request-for-quote functionality. Because retail trades are already pre-funded, Noch said the shift to instant settlement would require little change to existing retail workflows.

“The bigger differentiator is true weekend trading,” Noch said. “This could be impactful for retail heavy names or around episodic news events, similar to what we saw with tokenized oil PERPs during the start of the Iran conflict that started over the weekend.”

Related: Ondo lets institutions convert stocks directly into tokenized shares

Exchanges race into tokenized stocks

“Crypto venues are becoming multi-asset platforms, and traditional assets are adopting the 24/7, programmable structure crypto pioneered,” Tanay Ved, senior research associate at institutional digital asset technology firm Talos, said in comments shared with Cointelegraph.

That shift is playing out across major exchanges. Kraken offers xStocks and has partnered with Nasdaq on a separate tokenized equity model, while Binance, Coinbase and Robinhood have rolled out their own approaches to bringing equities onchain.

However, Ved said the different approaches involve trade-offs between ownership and accessibility:

The models of tokenization sit across a spectrum, from issuer-native equity to custodial exposure to pure derivatives. Each trades ownership for accessibility. Which model wins out is yet to be seen, as we sit in the early innings of adoption. For exchanges, the opportunity is a more diversified revenue base and for the market, the line between crypto and traditional assets continues to blur.

Meanwhile, the tokenized stock market has been expanding rapidly. Distributed value reached $3.14 billion as of Wednesday, up more than 18% over the past 30 days, while the number of holders climbed nearly 72% to 3.87 million, according to RWA.xyz data.

Tokenized stocks. Source: RWA.xyz

SEC opens path for tokenized stocks

The partnership also comes less than a week after the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) introduced a five-year “Innovation Exemption” for certain tokenized securities venues.

Under the exemption, eligible tokenized securities venues can use permissioned automated market maker liquidity pools to facilitate trading without being treated as exchanges under the Exchange Act. Among the conditions, venues must ensure that tokenized stocks carry the same rights and privileges as equivalent traditional shares.

Those requirements exclude some existing products from the exemption in their current form, including Kraken’s xStocks and Robinhood’s Stock Tokens, which provide exposure to underlying equities but do not give holders the same rights as conventional shareholders. 

However, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce has said that while the exemption covers one specific model for tokenized securities, it leaves open the possibility of other approaches outside the framework. 

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Cryptocurrency payments company MoonPay is set to acquire private-markets investment platform North Capital to support its tokenization efforts, according to an emailed announcement Wednesday.

Salt Lake City, Utah-based North Capital, whose platform boasts around $9 billion in primary and secondary transaction volume, will become a wholly owned subsidiary of MoonPay after the transaction closes, subject to regulatory approval.

The all-stock deal is worth over $60 million, sources familiar with the matter told CoinDesk.

The acquisition will support MoonPay’s aim of “building the regulatory foundation to support mass adoption of tokenized real-world assets,” according to CEO and founder Ivan Soto-Wright.

“We believe bringing those capabilities into the MoonPay ecosystem can help connect different parts of the financial system through modern, programmable infrastructure,” Soto-Wright added.

North Capital provides the tech infrastructure for tokenizing securities for private securities issuers and fund managers, supporting capital raising, asset management, clearing, custody, and secondary trading.

North Capital’s affiliates hold relevant broker-dealer, trading, transfer and investment advisory registrations with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

MoonPay has expanded beyond its core business of crypto payments in recent months, establishing its Trade platform to connect banks and fintechs to tokenized assets, DeFi protocols and stablecoin liquidity.

Tron uses a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism. Under this system, TRX holders stake their tokens to gain voting power and use that power to elect 27 Super Representatives, the validators responsible for producing blocks and maintaining the network. Because block production is concentrated among a limited, elected set of validators rather than distributed across a broad network of participants, Tron can achieve fast confirmation times and low computational overhead.

Stablecoins and the payments use case

The single most important development in Tron’s evolution has been its emergence as the leading settlement network for stablecoins. A substantial share of global USDT circulation now resides on Tron, and this characteristic separates Tron from many of its layer-1 peers: rather than competing primarily on DeFi innovation or consumer applications, Tron has positioned itself as digital payment rails for dollars.

That positioning shows up clearly in the network’s usage data. According to Tron’s blockchain explorer, weekly transaction counts on Tron have climbed to record highs, recently approaching 100 million transactions per week, even as the average onchain transaction fee has fallen to around seven cents, a multiyear low.

Weekly active addresses, a measure of unique wallets transacting on the network over a seven-day period, have also been climbing toward record levels, reflecting broad and sustained usage rather than a narrow base of activity. Stablecoin transfer volume on Tron has grown alongside this activity, recently running at roughly $150 billion to $190 billion per week.

“Boy, did I have impostor syndrome,” she says. “Here I was in this room full of eminences, and I had been reading their work, I’d been citing them, I’d been learning from them.” She also had some hard lessons to learn as a northeastern hippie in a majority-Black school district. “I just couldn’t believe the state of affairs in these schools,” says Moats. “Libraries with no books, no doors on the lavatory, no running water in the sinks.” She labored to get the teachers to trust her. Eventually, one of her assistants took her aside. “She said, ‘You’re the director, you’ve got to look like the director,’” recalls Moats, who favors denim and heavy glasses. “I said, ‘You have any advice?’ She said, ‘Go to Ann Taylor.’” The project was a success, her nine schools’ reading rates soared, and local politicians started to drop by for photo opportunities. 

Then national politicians took notice too. The No Child Left Behind Act that President George W. Bush signed in 2002 enshrined the work of Lyon’s team and the National Reading Panel. Moats was tapped to write the teacher-training component of the act’s Reading First initiative, which became LETRS.