Uniswap (UNI), one of the largest and longest-running decentralized exchanges, is pushing deeper into tokenized assets, introducing a feature designed to allow regulated securities to be traded on-site without sacrificing compliance requirements.
Decentralized exchange developer Uniswap Labs is launching “Permissioned Pools” on Thursday, a piece of infrastructure that allows issuers of tokenized funds, stocks and other regulated assets to restrict trading to approved investors while still using the protocol’s automated market maker.
That “gives issuers a flexible way to enforce their own compliance rules without building separate trading infrastructure,” Ken Ng, head of ecosystem at Uniswap Labs, told CoinDesk.
“The next generation of value will come on-chain and be traded on Uniswap,” he said.
Launch partners include tokenization companies Securitize (SECZ) and Superstate, along with European digital securities platform Dowgo, all of which plan to use the framework for regulated on-chain assets.
Tokenization trend enters DeFi
The move fits into a broader shift in decentralized finance (DeFi), where protocols originally created for open, permissionless trading and lending are increasingly adapting to the needs of financial institutions bringing traditional and regulated real-world assets (RWA) to blockchain rails. An example of this is Aave, the largest decentralized lender, which launched Horizon, an institutional lending venue for tokenized assets.
