OpenAgent, the company’s SEC-registered transfer agent, records positions and transfers onchain and keeps investor data in private systems, giving issuers a register they can read as it changes.
, /PRNewswire/ — As the SEC weighs the first rewrite of its transfer agent rules in more than four decades, OpenAssets, a leading digital asset infrastructure provider, said its affiliate SEC-registered transfer agent, OpenAgent, already operates the recordkeeping model the proposal would permit: the shareholder record onchain, investor identity offchain.
OpenAgent records position and transaction data onchain as part of the register: wallets, quantities, and each mint, burn, or transfer. Personal data stays in private systems, and a wallet-to-customer mapping joins the two. For issuers, that means the register is designed to be read as it changes, rather than received as a finished file after the fact.
The SEC’s September 1 proposal would let a registered transfer agent use a distributed ledger for all or part of its master securityholder file, the official shareholder record. Personal data would stay in private systems, while position data, including share counts and wallet addresses, would sit onchain.
How tokenized stocks are structured makes all the difference.A token recorded on a company’s own shareholder register, with the company’s consent, is a different instrument from a token issued by an unrelated party that tracks a share’s price. The SEC’s proposed Form TA-2 reporting would count the two separately, as issuer-sponsored and third-party-sponsored. This now carries into trading: under the SEC’s Innovation Exemption of September 17, tokenized stocks on qualifying venues must give holders the same rights as the underlying shares.
“A tokenized stock is only as good as the register behind it,” said Gabor Gurbacs, Chairman and CEO of OpenAssets. “The SEC is right to let the official record live onchain, and the market should hold that record to the same standard as any shareholder register. OpenAgent already works this way: every transfer is recorded as it happens, and investor identity stays private. Choosing a transfer agent now means choosing which record the market will trust.”
OpenAgent is designed for issuers of tokenized securities and the exchanges and counsel that work with them. The SEC is accepting comments on the proposal through Nov. 3.
About OpenAssets
OpenAssets builds infrastructure for digital financial systems. Through shared standards and purpose-built technology for real-world asset tokenization and sovereign digital currency, the company works with institutions, governments, and technology companies to modernize capital markets infrastructure. OpenAssets is developing and contributing the open standards for tokenization in collaboration with the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust. Learn more at openassets.to.
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