Onchain Stocks

The problem

Traditional equity settlement inherits a calendar. Trades match continuously but settle in batches, netting is a end-of-day exercise, and corporate actions are processed by intermediaries reconciling their own records against each other. The result is a market that appears real-time to a trader and is anything but underneath.

Tokenizing a share certificate does not fix this. Most tokenized-equity designs reproduce the legacy settlement model onchain and add a wrapper, which means they inherit the batching, the reconciliation and the intermediary set while giving up the legal clarity of the original.

What we built

Onchain Stocks treats the share as a settlement primitive rather than a wrapped receipt. Ownership, entitlement and encumbrance are separate onchain states, which means a position can be collateral, subject to a pending corporate action, and transferable in the same block without the three states contradicting each other.

Corporate actions are expressed as programmable events against the register rather than as messages between custodians. A dividend, a split or a rights issue is a state transition every holder can verify, not a notice that arrives at different times to different parties.

Continuous markets

A 24/7 market has a genuine problem that the legacy calendar quietly solved: with no close, there is no natural point at which to strike a reference price. We handle this with rolling settlement windows and a time-weighted reference series, so that instruments needing a fixed price — options, structured products, margin calls — have something defensible to reference without anyone reinstating a bell.

This is the part of the design we have written about most, and the part we expect to keep revising.

Where it sits

Onchain Stocks is infrastructure, not a venue. It is intended to sit beneath brokers, market makers and structured-product issuers rather than compete with them, and it is built to compose with the rest of the lab’s work — Perps Engine can margin against it, and the identity layer handles the eligibility constraints that regulated equity inevitably carries.