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SEC Gives DTCC OK to Tokenize Stocks In Move To Blockchain (bloomberg.com) 19

The SEC has granted the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., or DTCC, a no-action letter allowing it to custody and recognize tokenized stocks, ETFs, and Treasuries on approved blockchains for three years. "Although this program is a pilot subject to various operational limitations, it marks a significant incremental step in moving markets onchain," SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said in a statement. Bloomberg reports: With the permission, DTCC will also extend their record-keeping to the blockchain, Michael Winnike, global head of strategy and market solutions at DTCC Clearing & Securities Services, said in an interview. "It's the same legal entitlement, the same stock that you would hold in your account from the DTCC in traditional form," Winnike said. [...] The SEC's authorization of tokenization services only applies to a specific set of securities that trade often. The approval includes the Russell 1000 index which represents the 1,000 largest publicly traded US companies, as well as exchange-traded funds that track major indices and US Treasury bills, bonds and notes, Winnike said. "This allows us both to create value for the markets, while staying in a pre-defined pool of highly-liquid securities to start," said Winnike. The firm's ultimate aspiration is to add its entire depository, which represents $100 trillion in securities, to the blockchain, a move that would require further expansion of the no-action relief from the SEC, he said.

Winnike said the tokenization service will help bridge the traditional and digital worlds in part because the new technology will have the same legal entitlements and controls as traditional markets, including freezing or forced transfers if assets are stolen. "This enables participants to adopt and integrate, because they know there is a trusted party that can recover their securities as needed" and can address potential errors, he said. The new blockchain service will also allow investors to move assets all the time, not just Monday through Friday when traditional markets are open. "That creates a lot of new utility," Winnike said. "It brings the two ecosystems together."

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SEC Gives DTCC OK to Tokenize Stocks In Move To Blockchain

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  • by Mirnotoriety ( 10462951 ) on Friday December 12, 2025 @06:22AM (#65853057)
    perplexity.ai: Imagine money things like shares of companies or government bonds are like special toys that grown-ups trade. Right now, they keep them in big locked boxes at a place called DTCC.

    The bosses who make rules (SEC) said okay, DTCC can try putting copies of those toys on a super safe computer list called blockchain, like a magic notebook everyone can see but no one can cheat.

    This helps trade toys faster, any time day or night, without losing them, but only for a test with safe toys first.
    • This is a pilot to move toward using NFT-like tokens to represent stocks in the digital trading system.

      Your experience at say, Fidelity or RobinHood, will remain unchanged.

      The underlying technology will use things like Ethereum and Solana to create a global ledger that is open to the public showing who is moving what around.

      It will give the SEC radical transparency into stock trading activity to find bad actors.

      Let me say this again: it has nothing to do with pumping ETH, SOL, etc. This is using those chain

      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        From a technical standpoint your are correct. From a practical standpoint there is something we all are not seeing.

        The industry has customers that place a lot of value on relative anonymity. There isn't anything inherently illegal, immoral, or wrong with 'dark money' either it really isn't anyone's business what anyone else invests their personal wealth in. (beyond basic tax law enforcement etc, which yes privacy does complicate)

        The industry also must certainly be aware they make quite a lot of money off p

        • And there are also a larger number of people who aren't hiding anything, and the involved parties (including the government) already knows what all their securities transactions are.

          And some of those people might prefer to trade in a more transparent system that has less commingling with money launderers.

          Believing in lawful transactions and order is not a form of altruism. Don't be such a chucklehead.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    The grand master plan of crypto

    The plan for all cryptocurrencies isn't what they want to make you think it is. It's more sinister than the egalitarian image the crypto boys portray for it.

    After the 2008 financial meltdown, cryptocurrencies were born out of it, declared to be the means by which people could be freed from banks/governments, and promised to avoid any such future meltdowns from happening ever again.

    But the crypto boys watched closely the result of that meltdown, and formulated their plan: c

  • Theres a story about a 40 billion dollar crypto collapse due to fraud. The perpetrator is probably gonna get off with a slap on the wrist and probably gets to keep a few million dollars after the dust settles. Of course, who knows how much real money was lost because the numbers are basically made up when it comes to crypto valuation. Stablecoins included.

    “Tokenization” and “blockchain” is what theyve switched to because even average joes are finally wising up that “crypto
  • by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Friday December 12, 2025 @09:11AM (#65853177) Journal
    Can someone explain what's the difference between trading "tokenized" stocks, and just ordinary trading stocks? Why would I want to buy/sell a token that represents a share of a company, compared to actually buying and selling shares? Who receives the dividends? When you sell a token at a gain/loss, how do you document that in your taxes? Does DTCC report the gain/loss to the IRS? (Or do neither DTCC or the taxpayer report, in which case the SEC has just given the green light for massive tax fraud?) Who retains the shares' voting rights in this scenario?
    • by itsme1234 ( 199680 ) on Friday December 12, 2025 @10:23AM (#65853333)

      There's no difference, the blockchain is just a very inefficient database. It uses generally an ungodly amount of resources, has HUGE latencies and extremely low, unscalable transactions per second capacity.

      • by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Friday December 12, 2025 @11:00AM (#65853423) Journal
        Plus on many chains, the transaction fee is significant.
        • Absolutely, it's not even a set fee for whatever purpose, you're basically engaging in a global bidding war to push your transaction. And even so, higher fees don't translate into any higher capacity at all, and these kinds of transactions are just the ones that are bound to come in insane bursts when the market shifts, it is hard to imagine something worse than blockchain for the stock market.

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      I suspect that if you buy the token, you don't own the stock.

      Others have claimed that this is just using blockchain as the accounting log, but I'm dubious.

      • Maybe it's like nft? Your share token is just an URL of the company.

      • by BranMan ( 29917 )

        I suspect this as well. I would not touch blockchains for stocks with a 10' pole. I think it is just another way to disconnect the stocks from actual stock certificates.

        Consider - for years now the SEC has allowed brokers to get away from reality with shorting stocks. Many times I have seen aggregate short volume that exceeds the *entire existing number of shares*. That used to be impossible.

        Originally, the brokers had to literally track down someone who owned shares and agreed to "rent them out" for a

  • If the ledger becomes law, then the law must constrain the ledger, not the other way around. There need to be guardrails put around this: Separation of powers (DTCC is not the final arbiter) Deliberate friction for large or systemically risky trades Cryptographic auditability without unilateral rewrite power Explicit rights to challenge the ledger Radical transparency of rules, not trades
  • by boxless ( 35756 )

    Another project looking to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Or for which block chain is not really warranted. All because some director/VP level guy has to show us how smart he is.

    Who needs it? Who is asking for it?

    You know that signed transactions have been a thing for a long time.

    And look at the caveats they put in the description about backing out fraudulent transactions. They are basically admitting that the blockchain can be like the Wild West. But here, we have some sort of semi public th

  • Because this will destroy the former and humiliate the latter.

    Once blockchains start getting used for real world infrastructure, software economics will kick in and annihilate the majority of L1 blockchains. They'll crash hard to $0.

    On the flip side, all of the luddites who can't imagine how blockchain will work here will be shocked when nothing visible to the user changes and blockchain just becomes the tech underneath the covers... exactly as many of us have tried to warn you people.

    The average user will

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