Ex-FTX Europe Chief Files for U.S. Tokenized Stock Venue — SkimNews
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- Perpetuals.com filed a notice Wednesday to operate a tokenized U.S. stock marketplace under the SEC's five-year "innovation exemption" introduced in September, making it the second such filer after the OKX-ICE joint venture that plans 24/7 trading of 60+ tokenized U.S. stocks.
- The exemption requires tokenized shares to carry the same shareholder rights as ordinary shares — including dividends and voting — and gives issuers 30 days to object before their stock can be tokenized on a venue.
- Patrick Gruhn, Perpetuals.com's CEO, co-founded Swiss firm Digital Assets AG, which built stock-linked tokens for Binance and FTX in 2021 (including tokens tracking Tesla and Coinbase via German firm CM-Equity) before being acquired into FTX Group; Gruhn then led FTX Europe until its November 2022 collapse.
- Those earlier products lacked voting rights and Binance discontinued its offering in July 2021 amid BaFin scrutiny over the lack of a published securities prospectus — a structural contrast with the SEC framework's full-rights requirement.
- The U.S. venue will run through Delaware subsidiary Kephas Corporation, using permissioned AMM liquidity pools on the company's Ethereum-compatible layer-2 network Kronos X Public, with each pool pairing a tokenized stock with USDC.
- Datavault AI signed a deal with Perpetuals.com earlier this year to support tokenized commodity infrastructure (copper, gold) targeting $300 million+ in issuance, while Perpetuals.com reported $65.2 million in total assets at end of April against a $17.6 million net loss for the fiscal year.
- Trading could begin in mid-November at the earliest, contingent on the 30-day notice period and completion of market-data, compliance, and smart-contract security reviews, per a company spokesperson.
Why it matters: Perpetuals.com's filing marks the first major return of ex-FTX talent to tokenized U.S. equities since the November 2022 collapse, and the new framework's shareholder-rights requirements differ structurally from the voting-rights-free tokens Gruhn's prior firm built for Binance in 2021 — the same product that drew BaFin's scrutiny and was discontinued.
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