SEC Opens Wall Street to Tokenized Stocks | XRP Gets AI Payments Boost | Zcash Surges After Fed Hike | Daily Crypto Roundup

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Welcome back to the Daily Crypto Roundup. Wall Street just moved another step onto the blockchain. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has issued a major new exemption designed specifically for tokenized stocks. Ripple is pushing XRP and RLUSD deeper into the emerging world of autonomous AI payments. One of the biggest names in traditional financial risk analysis is buying a heavyweight blockchain security company. And Zcash has exploded higher as crypto markets shrug off the Federal Reserve's first rate increase in more than three years.

And there is plenty more going on, including another major crypto enforcement operation here in the United Kingdom. Before we get into all of that, here is where the market stands at the time of recording. Bitcoin is trading at roughly $76,800, up around 1% over the past 24 hours. Ethereum is near $2,460, up a little over 2%.

XRP is around $1.30, also higher on the day, while Solana has pushed back above $100 with gains of more than 3%.

The big outlier is Zcash. ZEC has been one of the strongest performers in the entire market, still sharply higher after surging by more than 20% earlier in the session. If you enjoy these daily updates, make sure you follow the show and send this episode to somebody else who follows crypto. Because today's biggest story could have consequences far beyond crypto itself. New Kraken users who sign up using our link in the description can claim 20 XRP from Crypto News Today.

Availability and eligibility vary by region. This is not financial advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. Now to the biggest story of the day.

The SEC has formally issued what it calls its innovation exemption. And this could become one of the most important bridges yet between traditional American stock markets and blockchain technology. The new order gives qualifying tokenized securities venues temporary and conditional relief from being treated as conventional exchanges under the Securities Exchange Act. In simple terms, the SEC is creating a regulatory route that allows approved venues to facilitate secondary trading in tokenized versions of national market system stocks using blockchain infrastructure. But there are some very important restrictions. This is not a free-for-all where anybody can create a token that claims to represent Apple, Nvidia or Tesla shares and immediately start trading it. The SEC says tokenized shares available through these venues must give holders the same rights and privileges as the equivalent traditional share class. There are also restrictions on the number of securities and trading volume, and trading must stop whenever trading in the underlying stock is halted on its primary exchange. Smart contracts used by the venues must also be auditable and public, and they have to be deployed on a public, permissionless distributed ledger.

There are additional protections where somebody other than the listed company creates the tokenized stock. The venue has to notify the underlying issuer and give that company an opportunity to object.

The exemption is temporary, but temporary in this case means potentially significant. It is scheduled to remain in place for five years, while the SEC gathers feedback and decides what permanent framework might eventually replace it. That means this is not merely another consultation about tokenization. The SEC is establishing a route through which actual tokenized securities trading infrastructure can begin operating. And this raises a very interesting question. If investors eventually become comfortable holding regulated blockchain representations of ordinary shares, does the dividing line between traditional finance and crypto start disappearing altogether? Because tokenization potentially changes the plumbing underneath markets rather than simply creating another speculative asset. Settlement can become more programmable. Assets can potentially interact with smart contracts. Trading infrastructure can operate differently. And eventually stocks, bonds, funds, stable coins and other financial assets could increasingly exist on compatible digital rails. That does not guarantee that every tokenization project succeeds. It also creates new risks around smart contract security, custody and market structure. But from a regulatory point of view, today is significant. And almost perfectly timed with that story, S&P Global has announced another major move into blockchain infrastructure. S&P Global has entered into an agreement to acquire OpenZeppelin, one of the most established smart contract security companies in crypto.

OpenZeppelin's open source contract libraries are used across a huge section of the blockchain industry, including stable coins, tokenized funds and decentralized finance applications. According to S&P Global, OpenZeppelin contracts have underpinned more than $37 trillion in value transferred, while the company has completed more than 900 security engagements. Financial terms have not been disclosed, and the acquisition still has to satisfy closing conditions. But think about what S&P Global actually represents. This is the company behind some of the world's most important financial benchmarks, market ratings and market intelligence. And it is buying expertise in smart contract risk. That tells you something about where institutional finance believes markets could be heading. If tokenized securities continue growing, institutions do not just need blockchain networks. They need ways of assessing whether the code underneath those assets is secure. Credit risk, counterparty risk and liquidity risk already dominate traditional finance. Smart contract risk could increasingly sit alongside them. If you want to protect your crypto with a hardware wallet, our Ledger link is in the description. Next up, XRP has another genuinely interesting utility development today. Although there is an important distinction here because some headlines are making this sound bigger than it currently is. RippleX has released version 1.1 of its XRP Ledger AI Starter Kit. The update adds support for the Machine Payments Protocol, or MPP, which was co-authored by Stripe and Blockchain Payments Network Tempo. That means developers building autonomous AI agents using the XRP Ledger can now use infrastructure compatible with that payment standard and allow those agents to pay for things such as data, computing services and other online resources using XRP.