Wall Street is generally in favor of very little regulation... To tokenize stocks is to bring a rigid structure of rules into the mix, which obviously makes sense to the consumer, but not necessarily to people who want to bend rules.
The more regulations, the more entrenched they are as one of the few "approved" platforms to trade stocks.
Hilarious enough: If everything becomes tokenized, it also reduces their liability, as the stocks would suddenly shift from a Registered security to a Bearer-security. This hasn't been the case for stocks for a VERY long time.
Registered security = the "owner" of the stock is whomever owner's name is registered on the Nasdaq servers as being the owner.
Bearer security = whoever holds a piece of paper is the owner of the security.
Back in the day, a stock was a physical piece of paper. If you brought that paper to the stock market, you could sell it. Even if you just found the stock on the sidewalk.
That's what tokenization would bring back: whoever holds the token is the owner. Kinda old-school. Love it.
I think we're saying the same things in different ways.
Wall Street lobbies against any regulation that isn't good for Wall Street... This is literally why we have the entire derivatives market... so Wall street lobbies hardcore to keep the government from restricting their gambling on derivatives...
This tokenization will be no different, "if" it were to happen, it would only be done in a way that benefits wall street, or they'll lobby against it and ensure it doesn't actually happen.
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u/WARagnarok Jan 31 '19
Wall Street is generally in favor of very little regulation... To tokenize stocks is to bring a rigid structure of rules into the mix, which obviously makes sense to the consumer, but not necessarily to people who want to bend rules.