marsbit Published on 2026-09-20 Last updated on 2026-09-20 The SEC has proposed significant updates to transfer agent rules, explicitly allowing blockchain technology to maintain ownership records. This move addresses foundational infrastructure needed to support 24/7 trading in US markets. While rules from the 1970s/80s assumed physical certificates, the new proposal modernizes the system by permitting distributed ledger technology for official stock ledgers. A key question raised is whether digital wallet addresses could replace the current requirement to collect a holder's name and physical address. This shift could enhance privacy but complicates issues like beneficial ownership reporting when wallet clusters cross regulatory thresholds (e.g., 5% or 10% ownership). The proposal does not make securities law inapplicable to tokenized assets but seeks to reduce unnecessary personal data in centralized databases. These changes align with other steps toward 24/7 trading, including extended clearing hours and overnight volatility limits. The goal is to improve market efficiency and reduce reliance on privileged OTC access after hours, moving toward a more unified, competitive, and accessible market structure. # Ownership Ledger # Tokenized Stocks # Transfer Agent Author: Thaddeus Pinakiewicz Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow Deep Tide Guide: For U.S. stocks to truly go 24/7, the bottleneck lies not only in trading hours but also in how transfer agents keep records. This week, the SEC proposed significant updates to transfer agent rules, explicitly permitting blockchain-based record-keeping and raising the sensitive question of whether 'wallet addresses can replace names and physical addresses'—directly impacting whether tokenized stocks can circulate more like bearer assets. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has taken another major step toward modernizing the 'plumbing' of the American financial system from trade to settlement. This week, the Commission proposed comprehensive updates to the rules governing transfer agents—the entities responsible for maintaining an issuer's official record of ownership, processing transfers, and ensuring that one share held by Alice doesn't accidentally become two shares under Bob's name. Most of the relevant rules have seen little substantive revision since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when physical certificates and manual processing were still the default and 'digital assets' were nearly meaningless. Concurrently, the SEC is preparing for a roundtable on 24-hour trading scheduled for September 17th, with an agenda covering exchange and broker-dealer readiness, overnight surveillance, closing price mechanisms, clearing and settlement, expected liquidity, cybersecurity, staffing, continuity of quotations, and the path from extended weekday trading to a true 24/7 market. These two developments might sound like separate threads (changing transfer agent rules here, discussing trading hours there), but they lead to the same destination: how long a market can trade continuously depends on how long the record of ownership, and the rails for clearing, settlement, and compliance, can support it. The puzzle pieces are already in motion: On June 26, the SEC approved expanding the operating hours of the consolidated equity securities data sources: from 9 PM Sunday to 8 PM Friday, with a one-hour technical pause each business night. On June 29, the NSCC, under DTCC, launched 24x5 clearing, operating from Sunday evening through Friday evening. On August 5, the SEC approved temporary overnight price volatility limits. Unlike the daytime Limit Up–Limit Down mechanism, hitting these limits does not automatically trigger a trading pause. On December 6, FINRA's Trade Reporting Facilities plan to extend their hours to align with broader progress in overnight markets. In a sense, the market is already close to 24/7—provided you know the right people or have a broker willing to accept overnight orders (for a fee, of course). Investors can access Alternative Trading Systems (ATS) and broker platforms, but the national market infrastructure that makes regular-session quotes and trades 'readable' isn't yet truly operational overnight. The result is a patchwork, not a unified market. You might ask: Why isn't it here yet? Ask someone from a bank or fund what happens after the closing bell, and you'll likely hear a litany of frustrations. Unless everything happens within the same platform, or you have top-tier infrastructure that money can buy—even then, end-of-day processes take time. Positions, cash, failed settlements, and corporate actions need to be reconciled between institutions. One party's ledger says one thing, another's says something else, and several people spend the night figuring out who owns what and where human errors occurred. Much of this is residue from decades of layered inefficiencies as the financial ecosystem evolved: different ledgers, different security forms, different custodians, different settlement systems, and an institutional structure where 'everyone holds their own version of the truth, and every night a séance is held to see if those truths align.' For over a decade, blockchain and common standards have demonstrated how far shared state and programmable settlement can push this problem. Even traditional giants are proving this point. JPMorgan states that its Kinexys currently processes about $7 billion daily, with over $4 trillion handled since launch. It's largely private and permissioned, yes, but it is still a shared, programmable ledger operating at institutional scale. What matters is not the ideological purity of 'using blockchain,' but improving the overall efficiency of the entire financial system through common standards and platforms. The proposed changes to transfer agent rules will explicitly recognize blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) as permitted media for record-keeping. To be fair, they likely weren't prohibited before. Current rules are technically neutral, and a transfer agent could plausibly argue—with some support from SEC staff guidance—that on-chain records already satisfy its obligations. Galaxy, along with our on-chain transfer agent Superstate, has already done this for GLXY stock on Solana. As a registered transfer agent, Superstate records legal ownership on-chain in real time. These shares are still restricted to verified investors and whitelisted wallets, so they are not yet stocks that can be permissionlessly composed across all of DeFi, but it proves the underlying model is already feasible. The SEC's proposal will shorten the distance between 'our lawyers think this is allowed' and 'the rule text explicitly allows it.' After all, lawyers are a very expensive consensus mechanism. Consensus, rollback, and forking risks won't disappear; they will become operational risks that transfer agents must manage and document, not reasons to reject using blockchain. The most interesting part comes from Commissioner Hester Peirce, who homed in on what is (from a regulatory perspective) the most 'heretical' question in the proposal: 'Should transfer agents continue to be required to collect the name and physical address of a security holder, or should the rules allow for the collection of other identifiers, such as an email address and a digital wallet address?' This is sure to spark the most passive-aggressive email chain ever cc'd to AML/KYC fundamentalists, but it's a fascinating question. Privacy advocates would welcome such a change, but under our current patchwork of securities laws, it opens a can of worms. Can tokenized stock be bearer assets? The analogy to bearer bonds isn't perfect but is useful. For a true bearer instrument, possession is everything (just ask Hans Gruber what he was looking for in Nakatomi Plaza). Congress effectively 'nuked' domestic bearer issuance decades ago with tax disincentives, rather than pretending the concept was metaphysically impossible and declaring it outright illegal. Not all tokenized stocks are, or should be, bearer instruments. But for those designed to circulate in a bearer-like manner, a public wallet address technically provides more information than an issuer has in a true bearer model: it is persistent, observable, and auditable. It's not knowing the person behind it, but it's also not 'zero information.' A cascade of fun follow-up questions ensues. What happens when a wallet—or 20 wallets controlled by the same person—crosses the 5% beneficial ownership threshold? A wallet address won't file a Schedule 13D or 13G; the person controlling it must. Cross 10%, and Section 16 reporting kicks in. Theoretically, identity could remain private at ordinary holding levels, with disclosure required upon hitting statutory thresholds, but someone, somewhere, must be able to aggregate addresses under common control in a defensible way. And what exactly is 'control'? A private key? A multisig signatory? A smart contract? An account held with a custodian? DAO voting? An advisor-managed, economically client-owned wallet? These questions are already thorny for DAO designers and governance token architects: how do you distinguish aligned voters from a wallet cluster controlled by a single entity when there's no explicit line of ownership? Pushing the logic to its extreme reveals points of tension with other regulatory regimes. There's a bigger question. If a wallet address can be a registered holder, and a transfer agent's ownership record only needs the address, could issuer-sponsored tokenized shares eventually leave closed whitelist systems and circulate freely on public networks—like xStocks and other SPV stock wrappers (e.g., Robinhood's euro stocks)? The SEC has been clear: putting a security on a blockchain does not change the application of securities laws. Beneficial ownership reporting, transfer restrictions, sanctions controls, and the broader BSA/KYC stack surrounding broker-dealers, custodians, and regulated financial institutions don't vanish because the certificate becomes a token. On the other hand, the proposal itself asks whether requiring full names and physical addresses creates unnecessary risk of unauthorized disclosure. There is a vast policy chasm between 'blockchain can maintain ownership records' and 'any anonymous wallet can freely receive this security.' Still, changing the transfer agent rules matters: it could reduce the amount of personally identifiable information sitting in centralized, hackable databases. The benefits of automated, standardized settlement systems built on blockchain and open protocols are becoming increasingly compelling. For those who don't care about settlement or think 24/7 markets are only for 'degenerate behavior,' read the research on overnight returns and intraday return disparities. Important information arrives when primary exchanges are closed, and overnight price movements are largely driven by this information (the SEC's August filing on overnight volatility limits explicitly discusses this). A closed exchange doesn't create an information vacuum; it creates a divide between investors who can access OTC or alternative venues and those who cannot. This proposal lays the groundwork for a 'sober version' of what DeFi has been trying to do for years. Bringing more investors closer to around-the-clock, and ultimately 24/7, trading should compress the rents brokers extract for 'finding' overnight liquidity, commoditizing more basic financial functions. It won't eliminate intermediaries, but it could force middlemen to compete on service and cost, not just on access. The flow of information doesn't stop when the market closes. Right now, a closed market only succeeds in letting privileged institutions access OTC. Regulation is finally catching up. Onward, upward. —Thad Pinakiewicz Related Questions Q According to the article, what significant proposal did the SEC make regarding transfer agents and what technology did it explicitly allow? A The SEC proposed a comprehensive update to transfer agent rules, explicitly allowing blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) as permitted media for maintaining official ownership records.

Q What is one of the core technical obstacles to achieving true 24/7 trading in US stock markets, as discussed in the article? A A core obstacle is the need for a modernized, efficient system for maintaining and settling ownership records. The current post-close reconciliation process between different institutional ledgers is time-consuming and inefficient, preventing seamless round-the-clock operations. Q What sensitive question related to investor identification did SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce raise in the context of the proposed rule changes? A She questioned whether transfer agents should continue to be required to collect a security holder's name and physical address, or if the rules should allow for other identifiers like email and digital wallet addresses. Q How does the article connect the concept of tokenized stocks to bearer instruments, and what regulatory complication does it highlight? A The article draws an analogy, suggesting some tokenized stocks could be designed to circulate in a bearer-like manner, where possession of the wallet address is key. However, it highlights the complication of applying beneficial ownership reporting rules (like Schedule 13D/G) when ownership is tracked by wallet addresses rather than named individuals. Q What is one potential benefit of moving towards 24/7 markets and standardized settlement systems, as argued by the author? A It could commoditize basic financial functions, reduce the premium that brokers charge for accessing overnight liquidity, and force intermediaries to compete on service and cost rather than mere access. 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