Perpetuals.com, a Nasdaq-listed fintech company, notified regulators this week of its intent to operate a tokenized securities venue under the SEC's five-year innovation exemption, which allows trading of U.S. stocks on public blockchains without traditional exchange registration.
The filing makes Perpetuals.com the second entity to pursue a marketplace under the framework, which the SEC introduced in September. The exemption requires tokenized shares to carry full shareholder rights, including dividends and voting. Companies have a 30-day window to object to their shares being traded on such a venue.
OKXICE, a joint venture between crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), filed under the exemption last week and is targeting round-the-clock trading for more than 60 tokenized U.S. stocks.
Patrick Gruhn, CEO of Perpetuals.com, is a former FTX Europe executive. He co-founded Digital Assets AG, a Swiss tokenization firm that worked with German investment firm CM-Equity to offer stock-linked digital tokens for assets like Tesla and Coinbase on platforms including Binance and FTX in 2021. FTX Group later acquired Digital Assets AG and integrated it into FTX Europe, which Gruhn headed before the exchange's collapse in November 2022.
Those earlier tokenized stock products operated differently from what the SEC's new framework permits. Binance's stock tokens, for example, provided price exposure but did not grant voting rights. Binance discontinued its offering in July 2021 following regulatory scrutiny from German regulator BaFin over the absence of a published securities prospectus.
Perpetuals.com currently provides trading technology for Perpetual Markets MTF, a Cyprus-based marketplace licensed under Europe's MiFID II framework. The firm secured authorization under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation in August.
Perpetuals.com reported $65.2 million in total assets at the end of April and posted a $17.6 million net loss during its fiscal year. Earlier this year, the company announced an agreement with Datavault AI to support trading infrastructure for planned tokenized commodity offerings targeting more than $300 million in issuance for physical assets like copper and gold.
