Project Open makes its case to the SEC
The post Project Open makes its case to the SEC appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. Have you ever wondered why stock trades take days to settle? Have you ever looked at the UX nightmare that is fractional ownership and thought, How in the world is this still the norm? And why is it exactly that your shares must live inside custodial black boxes? These design failures boil down to the fact that the US equity market is fundamentally outdated. It’s trapped inside legacy infrastructure, shackled by intermediaries and probably coded in COBOL. Efforts to modernize the system are usually surface-level. We might get faster messaging or marginally updated interfaces, but the core always seems to remain untouched. Hence, we live in a holding pattern of settlement delays, bloated fees and an ecosystem that is as opaque as it is exclusionary. Enter Project Open, a newly submitted SEC pilot proposal with blockchain at its core. Jointly proposed by the Solana Policy Institute, Superstate and Orca (and with legal support from Lowenstein Sandler), Project Open is a request for exemptive relief that would allow equity securities to be issued, registered and traded directly on public blockchain networks like Solana. The Solana Policy Institute, which launched at the end of March, is a non-partisan advocacy group aiming to help policymakers understand the role public blockchains can play in economic and social infrastructure. Project Open is its first major public action. The group submitted a 20+ page legal framework to the SEC’s crypto task force this week, complete with registration pathways, KYC onboarding, smart contract-based settlement, investor education modules and blockchain-native transfer agent roles. Issuers would file traditional-style registration statements, which is same-same with how we do things now. The main difference involves using a digital token class instead of paper shares. Transactions would settle instantly,…
Filed under: News - @ May 2, 2025 8:22 pm