As the SEC weighs the first rewrite of its transfer agent rules in more than four decades, OpenAssets, a leading digital asset infrastructure provider, said its affiliate SEC-registered transfer agent, OpenAgent, already operates the recordkeeping model the proposal would permit: the shareholder record onchain, investor identity offchain.

OpenAgent records position and transaction data onchain as part of the register: wallets, quantities, and each mint, burn, or transfer. Personal data stays in private systems, and a wallet-to-customer mapping joins the two. For issuers, that means the register is designed to be read as it changes, rather than received as a finished file after the fact.

The SEC’s September 1 proposal would let a registered transfer agent use a distributed ledger for all or part of its master securityholder file, the official shareholder record. Personal data would stay in private systems, while position data, including share counts and wallet addresses, would sit onchain.

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How tokenized stocks are structured makes all the difference.A token recorded on a company’s own shareholder register, with the company’s consent, is a different instrument from a token issued by an unrelated party that tracks a share’s price. The SEC’s proposed Form TA-2 reporting would count the two separately, as issuer-sponsored and third-party-sponsored. This now carries into trading: under the SEC’s Innovation Exemption of September 17, tokenized stocks on qualifying venues must give holders the same rights as the underlying shares.

“A tokenized stock is only as good as the register behind it,” said Gabor Gurbacs, Chairman and CEO of OpenAssets.

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