Com, a Nasdaq-listed fintech led by CEO Patrick Gruhn, has notified the Securities and Exchange Commission that it intends to operate a U.S. Venue for tokenized National Market System stocks under the agency’s new five-year Innovation Exemption. The filing makes it the second announced venue pursuing the framework, after OKXICE, a joint venture between OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, disclosed plans for round-the-clock trading in more than 60 tokenized U.S.
The relief is conditional: eligible tokens must provide holders the same rights and privileges as equivalent conventional shares, including dividends and voting rights. Venues must also notify issuers and give them an opportunity to object when an unaffiliated party tokenizes a stock, use auditable public smart contracts on a public permissionless ledger, and halt tokenized trading when the underlying stock’s primary exchange suspends trading.
Marketplace would be operated by Delaware-based Kephas Corporation. Its initial design calls for permissioned automated-market-maker pools on Kronos X Public, the company’s Ethereum-compatible layer-2 network. Each pool would pair a tokenized U.S. Stock with a digital asset, initially expected to be a form of Circle’s USDC stablecoin, allowing eligible investors to trade shares against the dollar-pegged asset.
The company has not set a firm launch date. It also plans to release updated disclosures, including live smart-contract addresses, before trading begins.
The initiative returns Gruhn’s team to a market it entered before the collapse of FTX in November 2022. Gruhn co-founded Digital Assets AG, which worked with CM-Equity on stock-linked tokens for assets including Tesla and Coinbase before FTX Group acquired the company and folded it into FTX Europe, which Gruhn led. Those earlier products provided price exposure but, in the case of Binance’s stock tokens, did not provide voting rights; Binance discontinued them in July 2021 amid regulatory scrutiny.
Perpetuals already supplies technology to Perpetual Markets MTF, a Cyprus-based marketplace operating under Europe’s MiFID II framework and authorized under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets rules. It also has an agreement tied to planned tokenized commodity offerings involving copper, gold and other physical assets, with more than $300 million in targeted issuance.