SEC Clears Paxos to Run Settlement on Blockchain Rails

Paxos said Thursday that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission granted clearing agency registration to its subsidiary, Paxos Securities Settlement Company, under Section 17A of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

That makes PSSC the only blockchain-native firm approved by the SEC to provide clearing and settlement services as a central securities depository in the United States.

For tokenization, this is the piece of plumbing that has been missing. A blockchain-native firm can now sit inside regulated post-trade infrastructure instead of waiting at the edge of it.

Paxos framed the registration as direct clearance to provide clearing and settlement infrastructure from inside the U.S. market structure.

Paxos Securities Settlement Company has been granted registration as a clearing agency by the SEC.

We are now the only blockchain-native firm registered to provide clearing and settlement infrastructure as a central securities depository in the United States.

With this…

— Paxos (@Paxos) May 28, 2026

The registration builds on Paxos work that goes back years. The company ran a live equities settlement pilot that began in February 2020 under SEC no-action relief, testing the model with major financial institutions before earning full registration.

Paxos:

NEW YORK — May 28, 2026 — Paxos, the leading blockchain infrastructure platform, today announced that its subsidiary, Paxos Securities Settlement Company, LLC (PSSC), has been granted registration as a clearing agency by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under Section 17A of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

The registration makes PSSC the only blockchain-native firm approved by the SEC as a registered clearing agency to provide clearing and settlement services as a central securities depository in the United States. The approval represents a critical piece of financial market infrastructure as blockchain technology and traditional capital markets continue to converge.

“Our clearing agency registration is the result of seven years of work with the SEC, beginning with our No-Action Letter in 2019 and the settlement pilot we operated with some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated financial institutions,” said Charles Cascarilla, CEO and Co-Founder of Paxos. “As a registered clearing agency, PSSC is able to provide clearing and settlement services for transactions in eligible securities.

Most importantly, it allows us to offer the most complete infrastructure for our partners to continue evolving with the market and blockchain technology.”

Read the scope carefully. This is a clearing-agency registration and central-securities-depository capability for eligible securities.

It is not a blanket SEC blessing for every tokenized-equity product on the market.

Still, the direction is clear. Tokenized real-world assets and traditional equities now have a regulated path onto blockchain settlement rails instead of running parallel to them.

As CoinDesk noted, the approval clears a key tokenization bottleneck and moves Paxos closer to handling real-world assets and traditional equities on chain.

The market-structure reaction focused on how long the SEC path took and how directly the approval points at legacy clearing infrastructure.

BREAKING: Paxos just became the first blockchain firm registered as a clearing agency by the SEC.

It took 7 years. One no-action letter. A pilot with Bank of America, Credit Suisse, and SocGen.

Now it can clear and settle US equities on blockchain. Competing directly with DTCC.

— Marc Baumann (@marcb_xyz) May 30, 2026

The win for crypto-native firms is leverage. Seven years of patient work with the SEC produced regulated standing inside the same post-trade layer that has long belonged to legacy infrastructure.

If tokenized securities scale from here, the firms that already hold registered clearing and settlement capability will own the rails the rest of the market has to use. Paxos just secured a seat at that table.

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