Peter Schiff calls SEC tokenized stock announcement bearish for Bitcoin despite rally

Bitcoin rallied after the SEC announced a sweeping new exemption for tokenized stock trading. Peter Schiff thinks the market got it exactly backwards.

The longtime Bitcoin critic argued that the SEC’s “Innovation Exemption,” which allows qualifying US trading platforms to conduct liquidity pool trading of tokenized National Market System stocks, is actually bearish for Bitcoin. His logic: if investors can own tokenized versions of real equities with real dividends and voting rights, why would they need Bitcoin at all?

What the SEC actually announced

On September 17, the SEC issued a five-year conditional exemption that lets qualifying platforms trade tokenized versions of NMS stocks without registering as traditional exchanges or dealers under existing securities laws.

The tokenized stocks must be fully backed by actual equities and confer identical shareholder rights, including dividends and voting power. Synthetic products, which track a stock’s price without conferring ownership, are explicitly excluded from the exemption.

Platforms looking to tokenize stocks also face a notification requirement. They must inform issuers at least 30 days before trading begins, and issuers retain the right to block their stock from being tokenized entirely.