Wall Street has spent years trying to get stocks onto blockchains. Now one Nasdaq-listed company wants to take the experiment a little further: let its shares trade through a crypto-style liquidity pool, even when the stock exchange is closed.
Canton Strategic Holdings, which trades under the ticker CNTN, announced plans to make tokenized versions of its shares available on the Canton Network as early as November 2. Buyers would be able to trade around the clock, with ownership and payment changing hands in the same blockchain transaction.
No waiting until Monday morning. There is no traditional settlement cycle for trades executed through the venue.
Sounds like the kind of upgrade tokenization advocates have been pitching for years.
But the Securities and Exchange Commission has built an interesting restriction into the experiment. Depending on the stock, a tokenized trading venue can handle only 0.25% or 2.5% of the underlying stock’s average daily trading volume.
For CNTN, Ravel’s calculations put that higher allowance at an average of just over 18,000 shares per day, equivalent to roughly $35,400 at the stock’s October 30 closing price.
That’s not a typo. A blockchain promising nonstop access to U.S. equities is beginning under rules that deliberately keep its trading activity a tiny fraction of the conventional market.
And the reason has less to do with blockchain speed than with what happens when two markets start pricing the same stock independently.
The Stock That Wants to Trade After Wall Street Goes Home
Canton Strategic Holdings is an unusual candidate for America’s next experiment in equity trading.
Formerly known as Tharimmune, the company shifted its focus toward the Canton Network ecosystem, investing in Canton Coin and participating in the network’s infrastructure and governance.
On October 29, the company disclosed an agreement with TSV LLC in an SEC filing. TSV plans to operate a tokenized securities venue using Tradecraft, an automated market maker protocol on Canton.
Fairmint, a registered transfer agent, would handle the tokenization and maintain the official on-chain ownership records.
This part matters. The proposed CNTN tokens aren’t supposed to be synthetic instruments that merely track a stock’s price. They are issuer-sponsored representations of the company’s actual common shares, carrying equivalent shareholder rights.
The planned venue also differs from a typical crypto exchange. Participants and their wallets must be approved, identity checks are required, and transfer restrictions are enforced through smart contracts.
The company described November 2 as the earliest possible trading date, not a guaranteed launch. At the time of this report, Ravel had not independently verified that production trading had begun.
Still, even before the first confirmed trade, the regulatory framework tells us something about the scale of the experiment.
The 2.5% Rule Buried Behind 24/7 Trading
In September, the SEC introduced a temporary exemption allowing certain Tokenized Securities Venues, or TSVs, to operate automated market maker pools for U.S.-listed stocks without registering as traditional securities exchanges.
The exemption was a significant concession. It created a regulated route for a trading model that looks more like decentralized finance than Nasdaq’s order book.
But the SEC’s September 17 order, Release No. 34-106402, also divided eligible securities into two categories.
Tier 1 covers stocks in the S&P 500 and Russell 1000, along with certain exchange-traded products. Venues using the exemption are limited to 75 Tier 1 symbols, with tokenized trading volume restricted to 0.25% of each underlying security’s prior-month average daily share volume.
Tier 2 covers other eligible stocks, including smaller companies. These receive a higher 2.5% trading-volume allowance, across a maximum of 250 symbols.
Why give smaller stocks ten times the percentage allowance?
This is because thinly traded stocks can quickly hit a low percentage ceiling. The SEC explicitly acknowledged that less-liquid securities need a higher threshold for the experiment to accommodate meaningful trading activity.
CNTN appears to fall into this second group. The company’s inclusion in the Russell Microcap Index additions published by FTSE Russell supports treating it as a Tier 2 security, rather than a Russell 1000 constituent.
That distinction gives us a number we can actually test.
Ravel’s Calculation: How Much CNTN Trading Fits Inside 2.5%?
Ravel reviewed CNTN’s trading history from October 1 through October 30, using daily share volumes published by Stock Analysis, sourced from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Across 22 trading sessions, CNTN recorded 15,970,377 shares in reported trading volume.
Divide that by 22, and the stock averaged 725,926 shares per session.
Applying the SEC’s Tier 2 allowance produces:
725,926 × 2.5% = 18,148 shares
CNTN closed on October 30 at $1.95.
At that price, 18,148 shares would be worth $35,389.
That’s the revealing part of the calculation. For a company proposing round-the-clock stock trading on a blockchain, the SEC’s current experimental framework translates into a relatively modest amount of trading activity.
There are important qualifications.
The $35,389 figure is Ravel’s dollar-equivalent illustration, not a monetary cap written into SEC regulations. The actual limit is based on shares traded, not dollars, and the tokenized venue’s average daily share volume is measured against the prior month’s conventional trading volume.
That means 18,148 shares is not a hard ceiling on any individual trading day. A venue could trade more on one day and less on another, provided its relevant average remains compliant. Affiliated venues must aggregate their activity.
Our calculation also uses published historical volume as a proxy. Official compliance calculations rely on consolidated volume reported through the applicable securities information processor.
Even with those limitations, the implication is striking: the amount of trading permitted under the exemption depends heavily on how actively the conventional stock trades.
If CNTN’s traditional average daily volume were to fall by half, its corresponding Tier 2 allowance would also fall by half in the following measurement period, assuming no change to the rules.
In other words, the blockchain market’s permitted scale remains tied to the market it is supposed to modernize.
A 24-Hour Market Still Needs Someone to Set the Price
Trading hours aren’t the only thing changing.
Traditional equities rely on centralized exchanges, market makers, and consolidated market data to support price discovery. A tokenized stock trading through an automated market maker uses liquidity deposited into a smart-contract pool.
That pool can quote prices when Nasdaq isn’t open.
But those prices won’t necessarily match the last available conventional-market quote.
TSV’s own public operating notice describes a concentrated-liquidity AMM using a Uniswap v3-style design. Execution prices would depend on the pool’s available assets, pricing algorithm, liquidity distribution, and trading conditions.
The notice also says external market data would be used for risk controls, not to mechanically determine the pool’s execution price.
At the time of that disclosure, TSV had not established a single fixed numerical reference-price band across the venue.
Imagine CNTN finishing Friday at $1.95. A major announcement lands on Saturday, when the Nasdaq market is closed.
Traders using the tokenized pool could react immediately. The AMM might move above or below Friday’s closing price as liquidity and orders change.
That isn’t automatically a malfunction. Discovering prices outside regular market hours is part of what makes the model interesting.
But the smaller the pool, the more vulnerable it is to price impacts from individual trades. And when conventional markets reopen, prices formed in two different trading environments may need to converge.
There’s a cost angle, too.
TSV’s published baseline fee for a standard pool is 0.30% per swap, ordinarily split between liquidity providers and the venue operator. A hypothetical $10,000 trade would therefore incur a $30 swap fee at that rate, before accounting for slippage, network charges, or other costs.
Actual production-pool fees may differ, and TSV’s notice says the applicable schedules must be disclosed before trading begins.
So the real comparison isn’t simply whether a tokenized trade settles faster. It’s whether traders receive enough additional convenience, price availability, or liquidity to justify the total cost of execution.
And whether there is sufficient liquidity waiting for them on the other side.
Why the SEC Built a Three-Month Brake Into the System
The volume restriction has teeth.
Under the SEC’s order, a venue that exceeds the threshold for a particular stock receives limited tolerance for its first breach. A subsequent breach requires the venue and its affiliated venues to pause trading in that security for three months.
The SEC isn’t trying to make AMMs slow. It’s trying to prevent an experimental market from disrupting the much larger market for the same underlying shares.
The regulator specifically identified the possibility of prices becoming disconnected between tokenized stocks and their conventional equivalents.
That’s a legitimate concern, especially when a tokenized market remains small enough for relatively modest transactions to affect pool prices.
The exemption also requires tokenized venues to publish transaction information in a freely accessible, machine-readable format, updated within ten minutes of execution. Required disclosures include trading prices, sizes, timestamps, directions, pool information, and smart-contract addresses.
This creates a useful test for the industry’s next wave of announcements.
Once trading starts, investors shouldn’t have to rely solely on press releases to understand whether activity is happening. They should be able to inspect venue-reported transactions and compare that activity with the SEC’s permitted thresholds.
It won’t answer every question about liquidity quality or fair pricing. But it provides a measurable starting point.
Meanwhile, DTCC Is Building a Different Kind of Tokenized Market
CNTN’s experiment is arriving at an interesting moment.
Just days earlier, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation launched its Tokenization Service on October 28, allowing eligible participants to create tokenized representations of securities held at DTC.
Twenty institutions had signed agreements to access the service, including major Wall Street banks and investment firms.
Both developments point toward tokenized securities becoming part of regulated financial infrastructure. But they are not interchangeable.
DTCC’s service primarily concerns converting and moving securities entitlements held within its custody framework. CNTN’s proposed arrangement concerns issuer-sponsored shares trading through a permissioned AMM.
They operate under different regulatory structures. The SEC’s 2.5% TSV trading-volume restriction does not automatically apply to DTCC’s tokenization service.
That difference matters because the word ‘tokenization’ often makes unrelated financial processes sound like one enormous, unified migration onto blockchain.
In practice, the industry is building several different systems, each with its own operational limits, liquidity requirements, and regulatory obligations.
The real test isn’t how many securities can theoretically become tokens. It’s what those tokens can actually do once they exist.
The Narrative Is Bigger Than the Launch
Canton Strategic Holdings and TSV are attempting something meaningful. Issuer-backed shares, a regulated transfer agent, permissioned trading, and atomic settlement represent a more substantial structure than simply issuing a token that follows a stock’s price.
The SEC has also created room for an experiment that would have been far more complicated under conventional exchange registration requirements.
None of that should be dismissed.
But neither should the scale of the experiment be exaggerated.
Ravel’s October volume calculation suggests that CNTN’s initial Tier 2 trading allowance corresponds to an average of around 18,148 shares per day, worth about $35,400 at the latest available closing price used in this analysis.
That doesn’t measure actual tokenized trading, which remains unverified at publication. Nor does it establish how much liquidity market makers will contribute.
It tells us something narrower, but arguably more useful: how much trading the regulatory framework is designed to accommodate before the experiment risks crossing its boundaries.
The next milestones are straightforward. Confirm the first production trade, examine the publicly disclosed transaction data, compare tokenized and conventional pricing, and see whether the venue attracts enough activity to make its settlement advantages economically relevant.
For now, 24/7 trading is a technical ambition with a deliberately limited regulatory runway.
Wall Street may finally be learning how to trade stocks without closing the market. The SEC is making sure the door doesn’t swing all the way open just yet.
