For most of its history, buying a stock meant trusting a long chain of banks, brokers, and clearinghouses to sort out who owns what, a process that still takes two full days to complete. On March 18, the SEC approved Nasdaq to trade and settle U.S. equities as blockchain tokens, baked directly into the National Market System. [FILING]
The Signal: The $126 trillion global equity market has started moving on-chain. The last time American equity markets underwent a structural shift of this magnitude was decimalization in 2001.
