Blockchain technology is like a Swiss Army knife that can provide different solutions depending on the problem. Over the past decade, the use cases for blockchain technology have grown from money and payments to decentralized exchanges and nonfungible tokens. Right now, it looks like the next major blockchain use case will be tokenized stocks.
Today, investors are able to buy traditional stocks like Tesla from cryptocurrency fintech firms such as Bitpanda. However, these stock shares are not stored and traded using blockchain technology. The global cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex did briefly let investors trade tokenized stocks like Apple and Pfizer, but they suspended tokenized stock trading shortly after its debut. The reason cryptocurrency exchanges and traditional exchanges have not enabled tokenized stock trading is that it is still a legal gray area.
To provide legal clarity on tokenized stocks, the European Commission is unleashing a forward-thinking regime in March 2023 that may usher in the “killer app” of blockchain technology. The DLT Pilot Regime, supervised by the European Securities Market Authority (ESMA), will test the full potential of tokenized security trading on blockchain technology. The term “security” can refer to stocks, bonds, private equity and many other types of financial investments. ESMA refers to these blockchain-based securities as “DLT financial instruments,” meaning they are financial instruments issued, recorded, transferred and stored using distributed ledger technology.
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Companies from both traditional and digital finance will be able to experiment with the use of DLT financial products in a regulated environment. The
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