U.S. Finally Legalizes Tokenized Stocks
Olivia Capozzalo & Camila Russo
June 27, 2025
Happy Friday, Defiers!
Today’s big story:
- Dinari becomes first firm with a license to offer tokenized stocks to U.S. traders
Plus:
- Bakkt pivots to crypto treasury playbook, looks to raise $1B
- U.S. judge denies Ripple-SEC joint request to reduce Ripple’s fine for unregistered securities sales
- Kraken launches international crypto and fiat payments app, Krak
- SSV 2.0 And Based Applications: Decentralized Infrastructure for Secure, Scalable Ethereum Staking [SPONSORED]
- The Stellar Development Roadmap Paves Way for Expansion and Network Scalability [SPONSORED]
Read more below! But first, please give our sponsors some love; they make this newsletter possible.
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Tokenized Stocks Are Finally Legal in the U.S.
Dinari’s broker-dealer win is the writing on the wall: U.S. regulators are ready to open the floodgates for onchain equities.
San Francisco-based Dinari yesterday announced that it has secured FINRA and SEC approval for its subsidiary to operate as a broker-dealer, offering “dShares,” tokenized representations of real U.S. stocks that will settle on public blockchains instead of legacy clearinghouses.
Rather than a consumer frontend, Dinari is white-labeling its API so that incumbent brokerages and fintech apps can plug into DeFi liquidity without forcing end users to learn a new interface.
Under its new registration, Dinari can mint dShares 1:1 backed by deposited stock certificates and settle trades on a blockchain. The process collapses the typical T+2 settlement cycle into near-instant finality: once your buy order executes, the blockchain updates your token balance, and you’re free to transfer or trade in seconds. Dinari plans to activate trading “in the coming months” after final SEC onboarding, having already struck undisclosed partnerships with several brokerages, Reuters reported.
Why On-Chain Stock Trading Makes Sense
Tokenized equities promise to democratize market access in ways today’s infrastructure cannot:
- Faster, cheaper settlement. Smart contracts automate custody and clearing, eliminating middlemen and reducing fees.
- Fractional ownership at scale. Beyond penny-level splits, tokens can be sliced arbitrarily, letting retail investors buy micro-shares in expensive names.
- 24/7 global markets. Time-zone arbitrage and volatility squeezes caused by after-hours moves could become relics of the past.
Why Stocks Have Stayed Off-Chain
Yet the old guard has reasons to cling to paper and ledgers:
- Regulatory complexity. U.S. securities laws, from proxy voting to dividend distribution, are tailored to centralized custodians and exchanges, not decentralized smart contracts
- Governance and compliance. Rule 15c3-3 custody mandates, audit trails and margin requirements don’t map neatly onto public blockchains, creating hidden legal and operational risks
Who’s Jumping In, and Who’s Been Here Before
Dinari isn’t alone. Coinbase is lobbying the SEC for a “no-action” green light, and Kraken, this spring, launched xStocks in non-U.S. markets. Securitize and Republic have also built regulated token-issuance platforms since 2021, targeting real-world assets from private equity to art funds.
But tokenized stocks have stumbled before. Terraform Labs’ Mirror Protocol and Synthetix once offered tokenized stocks only to face SEC subpoenas and regulatory uncertainty that spooked speculators and led to peg failures and liquidity crises.
Those early experiments catered to DeFi traders, though. Dinari’s model, by contrast, plugs traditional brokerages into on-chain rails under a transparent compliance framework.
Native On-Chain IPOs?
Dinari’s win could be the first domino. If the SEC and FINRA modernize rulebooks to accommodate smart-contract governance, we may see firms issuing new shares directly onchain, complete with programmable dividends, tokenized voting and instantaneous regulatory reporting. Industry groups like the WEF project that up to 10 % of global GDP will be tokenized by 2027.
Just like we have newspapers and digital media, in the future we’ll likely have on and off-chain stocks trading, with much of the volume gradually moving onchain, especially as new IPOs will likely start to happen directly there. The only question left is which incumbents will be first to integrate and which will be the stubborn holdouts.
With love,
Cami, founder of The Defiant
📈 Markets in the last 24 hrs:
| TICKER | VALUE | 24H | |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Bitcoin | $107,238 | 0.04 % |
 | Ethereum | $2,434.81 | 0.22 % |
 | XRP | $2.1 | -0.12 % |
 | BNB | $646.52 | 0.24 % |
 | Solana | $143.4 | 0.55 % |
 MessariPortals | MINDSHARE Rank | MINDSHARE % Change (7d) |
|---|---|---|
 Solana SOL | 6  | 41.55% |
 Avalanche AVAX | 20 | 28.95% |
 TRON TRX | 8  | -19.81% |
| Powered by Messari Portals | ||
This is the news that mattered in the past 24 hrs
- Bakkt, the crypto trading infra firm launched by the NYSE’s parent company in 2018, filed with the SEC to raise up to $1 billion that could be used to create a crypto treasury that includes Bitcoin; last month, the publicly traded firm was approved to hold crypto on its balance sheet.
- Per a New York judge’s decision yesterday, Ripple still has to pay a $125 million fine for sales of XRP to institutions, which the same judge last year ruled to be an unregistered securities sale; Ripple and the U.S. SEC had filed a joint request last month to reduce the fine by 60%, but the judge just denied it.
- U.S.-based crypto exchange Kraken — currently the 6th largest exchange globally by 24-hour volume — has launched Krak, an app for cross-border crypto and fiat payments; the exchange says it plans to offer lending and a physical and virtual cards from the app in the future.
🎬WATCH
In the latest episode of The Defiant Podcast, Cami spoke with Emin Gün Sirer, CEO and Founder of Ava Labs. They discuss the growth of gaming on Avalanche, how the chain compares to other top Layer 1s, and the role of stablecoins and central banks in Avalanche’s ecosystem.
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