SEC Approves New US Exchange That Uses Blockchain Technology

If you’ve ever traded stocks on an exchange before, you know that while buying and selling can happen really quickly, the full settlement of a trade can take as long as 2 days to complete. However, the SEC has approved a new US exchange called the Boston Security Token Exchange (BSTX) that uses blockchain technology for faster trade settlements.

For those unfamiliar, blockchain technology is pretty much the underlying technology behind cryptocurrency. It basically acts as a ledger of sorts where once information is written onto the blockchain, everyone on the blockchain will have a copy of that information, meaning that trying to tamper with it, changing the data, and so on will not be possible since everyone else already knows the original.

This is why the tech is used by NFTs which help to verify who owns the digital asset and whose hands it has been passed through. With the BSTX leveraging blockchain technology, it aims to help traders settle their trades either within the same day itself, or up to a day at most.

Despite it using blockchain, the BSTX will only allow traders to trade securities such as stocks or ETFs. There was an initial plan to use it to trade tokenized securities, but it was rejected by the SEC. However, the BSTX does plan to eventually expand to cover tokenized securities if they can get it approved, but for now, the SEC says that notwithstanding faster settlement times, the BSTX will still adhere to the “substantively similar” rules that other more traditional exchanges follow.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: blockchain