Uniswap (UNI), one of the largest and longest-running decentralized exchanges, is making a deeper push into tokenized assets, introducing a feature designed to let regulated securities trade on the venue without sacrificing compliance requirements.
The decentralized exchange’s developer, Uniswap Labs, is rolling out “Permissioned Pools” on Thursday, a piece of infrastructure that allows issuers of tokenized funds, equities 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, explained to CoinDesk.
“The next generation of value coming onchain, and it’s trading on Uniswap,” he said.
Launch partners include tokenization firms Securitize (SECZ) and Superstate, along with European digital securities platform Dowgo, all of which plan to use the framework for regulated onchain assets.
Tokenization trend enters DeFi
The move fits into a broader shift across 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. One example for that is Aave, the largest decentralized lender, which rolled out Horizon, an institutional lending venue for tokenized assets.