Former FTX Europe chief files to trade tokenized US stocks on chain

Patrick Gruhn, who ran FTX Europe and co-founded Digital Assets AG, filed on 14 October to open a tokenized US stock venue through Perpetuals.com, the Nasdaq-listed company he now leads. Trading could start in mid-November, after the 30-day window in which issuers can object to their shares appearing on a tokenized venue.

“This expansion into the US allows us to further utilise our platform and deep expertise”

— Patrick Gruhn, CEO, Perpetuals.com

What the exemption allows

The exemption behind it arrived in September. It lets a marketplace trade US stocks on public blockchains for five years without registering as a securities exchange, on the condition that each token carries the rights of the ordinary share behind it, dividends and votes included. That condition is what separates this from the synthetic stock tokens exchanges sold in 2021, which tracked a price and carried nothing else.

Perpetuals plans permissioned automated market maker pools, pairing tokenized shares against USDC on Kronos X Public, an Ethereum-compatible layer-2. Price discovery comes from the pool, with no matching engine in the middle, which decides how a thin book behaves on a volatile morning. A buyer gets the pool price plus slippage, and the depth of that pool is what the venue has to fund.

Who is filing

Perpetuals reported $65.2m of total assets at the end of April and a $17.6m net loss for the fiscal year. One year of losses equals 27% of that balance sheet, and the pile covers 3.7 years at the same rate.

OKX and ICE, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, filed for their own tokenized stock venue a week earlier, which puts an incumbent exchange group and a crypto exchange on the same side of this trade.

What is underneath

The on-chain base underneath stays thin. The whole real-world asset category on DefiLlama holds $4.1bn, 0.14% of the $2.835tn crypto market, and most of it sits in tokenized treasuries rather than equities. We measured the same gap in September, when Binance made tokenized stocks usable as margin while their market stayed shut at weekends.

Three things settle by December. Whether any issuer objects inside the 30 days. Whether the venue opens on schedule. And what the first week of volume looks like beside the $65.2m balance sheet, because a tokenized wrapper does not create liquidity on its own, as the ARK fund showed when its tokenized class met a four-times-a-year exit.

Informational material, not investment advice. The filing starts a 30-day objection window, so trading may begin in mid-November at the earliest and the venue has published no volume figures yet.