German regulator licenses Boerse Stuttgart to trade and settle tokenized securities on blockchains

Germany's financial regulator, BaFin, has licensed Boerse Stuttgart Group to run a system that both trades and settles securities issued on blockchains. The group announced it on 20 October. The licence comes under the DLT Pilot Regime, the European Union's trial rules for market infrastructure built on distributed ledgers, the shared databases behind blockchains. BaFin granted it after a process run with the European Securities and Markets Authority and the European Central Bank. The group says it is the first exchange group in Europe to hold one.

The licence is for Seturion, the group's settlement platform. Settlement is the step after a trade, when securities and cash actually change hands. In Europe it still runs through separate national systems. Seturion wants to be one platform open to banks, brokers and trading venues across Europe. Venues that connect to it can offer trading in tokenized assets without a licence of their own. Its partners so far are flatexDEGIRO, an online broker, Nasdaq, Société Générale and SG-FORGE, the French bank's digital-asset arm.

Börsen-Zeitung, the German financial daily, calls it a bigger licence than Deutsche Börse's. That group's venture 360X has held a pilot-regime licence since February 2025, but for trading only, not settlement. The paper reports that structured products will come first, as Lidia Kurt, Seturion's chief executive, said in February, given Boerse Stuttgart's lead in trading them. Seturion can settle against money held on a blockchain or against central bank money. Börsen-Zeitung notes that the ECB has offered central bank money for such settlement through its Pontes platform since mid-September.

Both German reports, citing the company, say Seturion promises costs up to 90% lower. The release on the group's own site does not carry that figure. Neither the release nor the reports give a date for the first live settlement, and Börsen-Zeitung expects more partners to join this autumn and winter. The pilot regime also caps how much can pass through such systems. In September Boerse Stuttgart was among 27 signatories asking EU lawmakers to lift that ceiling, which Brussels is revising.