The SEC Lays the Rails for Tokenised Equities

The SEC Lays the Rails for Tokenised Equities

The SEC opened an immediate route to onchain trading in rights-bearing US-listed shares last week, moving tokenised equities from a structural promise into something that can be built today. Its new Innovation Exemption granted Tokenised Securities Venues temporary, conditional relief to trade tokenised US-listed shares through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools, smart-contract mechanisms through which buyers and sellers transact directly on a blockchain rather than through a traditional stock exchange. The relief took effect immediately and runs for five years, allowing regulation to evolve alongside innovation even after Congress failed to pass the Clarity Act.

The critical distinction drawn by the exemption was between ownership and imitation. Eligible tokens must give holders the same rights and privileges as the underlying share, including the economic and governance claims attached to the real security. That favoured platforms prepared to issue or service rights-bearing tokenised shares and excluded synthetic products that merely track a price. Robinhood (HOOD US) has distribution but would need to evolve its current synthetic offering; Coinbase (COIN US) has already indicated it intends to launch tokenised share trading and is building the banking bridge through Stablecore.

The exemption also defined the infrastructure requirements. Smart contracts must be auditable, public and deployed on a public, permissionless distributed ledger, while venues must observe trading halts in the underlying security and operate within initial limits on symbols and volumes. This is a controlled route for onchain secondary trading, not a deregulated free-for-all, but one that validates public blockchains as settlement infrastructure and opens the prospect of round-the-clock markets in equities and other financial assets. The SEC has not completed the architecture, but it has laid enough rail for the market to start building.

Beyond tokenisation, and with the Fed meeting now behind us, the broader market offers little to trade. Yield curves continue to flatten, unusually so even in German rates, the Middle East conflict remains unresolved, and attention is already turning toward the US midterms in roughly two months. In that environment, the emphasis shifts further toward company-specific earnings stories rather than macro-driven positioning.

What Drove The Collective Ideas Last Week

Collective Conviction Ideas: +1% WoW

The Conviction ideas advanced roughly +1% on the week, a modest gain in a tape that offered little macro direction and was not rewarding broad positioning bets. Digital-asset and tokenisation-linked exposure led the upside as the SEC's exemption provided a genuine policy catalyst, deepening institutional confidence in the broader digital-asset ecosystem and supporting sentiment across the franchise. Base-metal and precious-metal names gave back small ground in a cautious, macro-light week, a positioning drift rather than any change in the underlying commodity thesis. The broader posture remained deliberately diversified, tilted toward company-specific drivers: infrastructure bottlenecks, real assets, security spend, and the physical constraints defining the next phase of AI. With the midterms approaching and little left in the macro calendar to trade, the emphasis stayed on ideas whose earnings cases are built from inside the business rather than dependent on external conditions.

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Stock Of The Week

Turning Portfolio Value Into Cash

IP Group's half-year results gave investors something that has historically been missing from the story: tangible evidence that portfolio valuations can be converted into cash. The group generated £68.7m of proceeds in H1, already exceeding the whole of 2025, including exits from Hinge Health and Centessa. NAV per share rose 3.2% to 113.9p, while gross cash and deposits increased to £239m.

The underlying portfolio is also moving forward. The value of IP Group's Pfizer obesity royalty increased by £27m to £152m, while portfolio companies raised £543m of external capital during the period. Since June, Oxford Nanopore's recovery has added another £26.4m to fair value, taking estimated NAV to around 117p per share by 11 September.

The investment case now comes down to whether that momentum can continue. IP Group is targeting more than £250m of realisations between 2025 and 2027, with £137m already delivered by the half-year and a further £17.1m received since. If more of the portfolio can be converted into cash while NAV continues to grow, the longstanding discount between the share price and the value of its underlying science and technology assets becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

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