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Welcome to the Monday edition of the 51 Insights digital asset newsletter.
Here's what matters this week:
Morgan Stanley is buying Vinyl Equity, a firm that keeps shareholder lists.
NYSE picks Avalanche's technology for the ledger behind its tokenized stocks.
PNC lets corporate clients get paid in USDC, and it arrives as dollars.
On the podcast
Zach Pandl ran currency strategy at Goldman Sachs and now leads research at Grayscale. Last month he told clients to buy bitcoin, even after a Fed hike and the failure of CLARITY. “It's a green light,” he told me. His reason: every big government has a debt problem, so money looks for what he calls “the third way.”
Watch Zach Pandl on YouTube THE BIG STORY / TOKENIZED STOCKS
Companies don’t want to be tokenized
What's going on here?
A transfer agent keeps the official list of who owns a company's shares. It's one of the dullest jobs in finance. This morning Morgan Stanley agreed to buy one, Vinyl Equity, and said the deal adds infrastructure for future tokenization. No price given; it expects to close in early 2027. Also this morning, NYSE named Avalanche's technology as the ledger for its coming tokenized stock platform. NYSE already has six transfer agents signed up, including Broadridge and Computershare.
The other route is going badly. OKXICE, half owned by NYSE's parent ICE, proposed trading tokens of big US stocks. Its November 5 notice lists 67 companies that objected, including Apple, Meta, Nvidia and JPMorgan. Of the 62 stocks it first proposed, 56 have said no.
