As President Donald Trump ends Biden-era regulations on digital assets, crypto companies are openly discussing creating new products that were previously considered off limits.
Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the U.S, is renewing a push to offer tokenized securities. Unlike traditional crypto coins, these are a digitized version of traditional securities, like stocks, bonds, or other investments, which can be traded using blockchain technology.
“I now believe that our U.S. regulators are looking for product innovation and looking to move forward,” Coinbase’s chief financial officer Alesia Haas said at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference on Tuesday. “And I’m now excited that we may be able to re-engage those conversations with the SEC’s task force, that we may be able to bring forward security tokens.”
Haas’s comments follow similar public statements from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong last month. “I’m also pretty interested in tokenized securities and equities, the traditional securities and equities out there,” he said in a February earnings call. “I think it offers a lot of promise to consumers around being able to trade 24/7.”
Security tokens, a long-held dream in the crypto space, aim to make it easier to buy, sell, and track the ownership of securities. These types of digital assets differ from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin because they would be subject to securities laws.
Coinbase originally sought to bring tokenized securities to the American market in 2021 through an S1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As part of the filing, Haas said, the company tried to go public with a tokenized version of its own stock, COIN. But the plan was halted by Biden’s SEC chair, crypto skeptic Gary Gensler.
The company “could not get it over the line with the SEC at the time,” Haas said in a statement to Fortune on Thursday. “We would have loved to see a crypto-native version of our stock as the first major crypto company to go public.”
Coinbase’s renewed talk of tokenized securities comes as the SEC, led by interim chair and industry-friendly commissioner Mark Uyeda, ends a series of lawsuits and investigations into crypto companies originally initiated under the Biden administration. Last month, the SEC agreed to dismiss a lawsuit against Coinbase alleging the company had been operating an unregistered brokerage and was offering unregistered securities.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is also on an exclusive list of executives attending the White House’s first crypto summit hosted by Trump this Friday, where government officials and industry leaders are set to discuss crypto policy.
