Dinari: Confirming Asset-Settled Perps On U.S. Equities (The Full Story)

Gabe Ott said the tokenization exemption’s exclusion of synthetics was surprising, but also signaled that tokenized stocks are expected to preserve the rights and exposure associated with stock ownership. He described the exemption as allowing tokenized stocks to trade on compliant DeFi venues, including through automated market makers, while keeping the underlying asset and its investor protections central.

That permission could support on-chain stock swaps, such as exchanging Apple for Nvidia directly, but their practical treatment remains unsettled. Ott said it is not yet clear whether such swaps would be taxable or whether they would deliver a meaningful benefit to end users. He viewed the exemption’s five-year period as an opportunity to test which on-chain trading features can be permitted without weakening investor protections or the broader capital markets.

Ott said the innovation exemptions now make asset-settled perpetual contracts on U.S. equities possible. One potential transaction path would be to buy Nvidia stock on-chain, borrow against it on Aave, and use the borrowed value in perps. The example illustrates how tokenized shares could serve as collateral across on-chain financial products, though the discussion did not establish that every step is already available in practice.

The exemption’s permissioned-access provisions also matter, Ott said, because bearer securities can create fraud risks and AML rules help support trust in U.S. capital markets. He argued that access controls and investor protections need not be discarded for tokenization to advance. In his view, the objective is to test new trading functions while preserving safeguards that users and the market rely on.

Ott distinguished Dinari’s licensed activity within the national market system from transfer agents’ ability to mint new asset classes outside it, and said the approaches can coexist. The exemption does not require issuer buy-in, although issuers may have a veto. Issuer participation could enable permissionless trading outside the national market system, but Ott said issuer-sponsored assets would require scaling issuer by issuer; he expects most capital-markets users to care less about permissionlessness than about preserving familiar rights and access.

Transfer-agent tokenization, Ott said, does not replace Dinari’s broker-dealer work. He favors a more permissive approach to tokenization at the transfer-agent level and hopes it will accelerate adoption, while continuing to focus Dinari on modernizing capital markets without taking away end-user rights. He described recent SEC actions as vindication of the idea that tokenization can progress while those rights are preserved.