Tokenized Equities Just Got Real. Two Execs Can't Agree on How Fast.
The SEC cleared tokenized stock trading and two industry executives gave very different timelines on CNBC's ETF Edge. Here's what actually changes, who gets squeezed out, and the tell nobody's watching.
Your brokerage just moved your stock trade to T+1 settlement. That's still a full day too slow. Anon, let me explain.
Wall Street runs on plumbing most people never see. The DTCC clears quadrillions of dollars in trades every year. Transfer agents, custodians, clearing brokers, all shuffling databases around like it's still 1998. Tokenized equities promise to rip that stack out and rebuild it on-chain. This week that idea got a lot closer to real.
The Story
The SEC cleared tokenized stock trading, and the reactions came fast. CNBC's ETF Edge put two executives on the spot. Nick Cherney leads innovation at Janus Henderson, an asset manager sitting on roughly $360 billion. Gabor Gurbacs runs Openassets, a tokenization platform.
Cherney thinks adoption moves quickly. Gurbacs says it takes time. Same regulatory headline. Two very different clocks.
Why the split? Cherney sits inside the machine. He knows how fast a large asset manager can spin up a product once the lawyers say yes. Gurbacs sits outside it building the rails. He knows how slow custody, compliance, and settlement layers actually move. Both are right. That's the whole tension here.
Here's the thing. The SEC didn't just wave a wand. It carved out an exemption that lets certain tokenized equity structures trade without tripping the same registration rules that govern traditional securities. That's the crack in the door.
The Analysis
This is bigger than people realize.
Tokenized equities don't just change how you buy a stock. They change what a stock is. On-chain shares can settle in seconds, trade 24/7, and plug into DeFi as collateral. That's a monster shift. A stock you can borrow against at 3am on a Sunday isn't the same product your grandfather owned through a broker.
So who wins? Tokenization platforms. Market makers with on-chain desks. Retail traders in Asia and Europe who finally get US equity exposure without a US brokerage account. The whales are already circling. BlackRock and Franklin Templeton have been building tokenized fund products for over a year.
Who loses? The middle layer. Transfer agents. Back-office clearing shops. Anyone charging a fee for a settlement step a smart contract does for pennies.
But here's where I push back on the hype. Tokenized stocks still need a legal wrapper. Somebody holds the actual share. Somebody handles dividends, voting, and corporate actions. If that somebody is the same custodian bank charging the same fees, you didn't remove the middleman. You gave him a blockchain receipt. That's not progress, that's theater.
The chain doesn't lie. Until the underlying custody gets restructured, most tokenized equity products are wrappers with better marketing.
What to Watch
The signal isn't the exemption itself. It's what the big asset managers file next. Watch for tokenized share classes from the top 10 issuers. Watch the DTCC's response, because that's where the real fight lives. And watch settlement times. If on-chain equities settle in seconds while the legacy market still takes a day, capital follows the faster rail. Every time.
Cherney and Gurbacs disagree on speed, not direction. That's the tell. When the insider and the outsider both agree on the destination, you stop asking if it happens and start asking who's positioned for it.
The trade isn't whether tokenization wins. It's which players survive the rewiring.
