Uniswap ($UNI), one of the largest and longest-running decentralized exchanges, is making a deeper move into tokenized assets, introducing a feature designed to allow regulated securities to be traded on the platform without sacrificing compliance requirements.
Decentralized exchange developer Uniswap Labs on Thursday is introducing “Permissioned Pools,” 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 a separate trading infrastructure,” Ken Ng, head of ecosystem at Uniswap Labs, explained to CoinDesk.
“The next generation of value is coming on chain and being 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 onchain assets.
The tokenization trend is entering DeFi
The move fits within a broader shift within decentralized finance (DeFi), where protocols originally built for open, permissionless trading and lending are increasingly adapting to the needs of financial institutions bringing traditional, regulated real-world assets (RWA) onto blockchain rails. An example of this is Aave, the largest decentralized lender, which has rolled out Horizon, an institutional lending platform for tokenized assets.