The New York Stock Exchange is turning to Avalanche to power the behind-the-scenes plumbing of its forthcoming tokenized securities platform — one of the clearest signs yet that Wall Street's oldest institutions are moving core market infrastructure onto public blockchains. If approved by regulators, the arrangement would put a public blockchain beneath the clearing-and-settlement layer — the market's core plumbing — rather than beneath a single product.

Ava Labs, the company behind Avalanche, said on Monday that the blockchain will serve as the "core ledger technology" for the clearing firm behind an NYSE-affiliated digital trading venue, according to an official announcement. The platform, which the NYSE's parent company, Intercontinental Exchange, has previously said it is developing, is designed to allow 24/7 trading, clearing, and settlement of tokenized securities, subject to regulatory approval. Running on Avalanche, it aims to bring the clearing of tokenized equities onchain at institutional scale.

Tokenization — the practice of issuing traditional assets as blockchain-based tokens — has become one of Wall Street's buzziest pursuits, but most efforts to date have centered on individual products rather than the market machinery itself. That is what makes the NYSE's move notable: it places a blockchain underneath the clearing and settlement layer, the plumbing that finalizes trades, rather than simply wrapping a single fund or stock in a token. Clearing and settlement is the stage where trades are confirmed and ownership officially changes hands — a process that in conventional markets runs through layers of intermediaries and after-the-fact reconciliation. Consolidating that stage onto a shared ledger means a single, continuously updated record of who owns what, which is why a choice at the infrastructure level carries more weight than a product-level token experiment.

Dennis Lee, the NYSE's head of digital issuance, said the exchange is "picking the right technology for each job." While the planned platform will support equities listed across a range of blockchains, he explained, the ledger that records and settles trades needs to be fast, reliable, and able to control who participates — a requirement familiar to regulated markets, where even open public networks must accommodate restricted access for approved participants.

Emin Gün Sirer, Ava Labs' CEO and founder, framed the deal as proof that blockchains can support not just individual products but the infrastructure those products trade on, citing Avalanche's "24/7 atomic settlement" and predictable costs. He described the arrangement as evidence that public blockchains have matured to the point of supporting core financial market functions.

The announcement adds to a frenetic race to put stocks — and the infrastructure beneath them — onchain. The NYSE has separately tapped Blockchain.com to reach crypto investors with tokenized stocks and ETFs, while Intercontinental Exchange and crypto exchange OKX are planning a 24/7 tokenized stock venue under an exemption from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Morgan Stanley, meanwhile, has moved to tokenize securities. For the NYSE-affiliated platform, regulatory approval remains the gating step — the milestone that determines whether this machinery actually goes live.

That OKX-ICE effort has hit friction, however: every Magnificent Seven stock, including Apple and Meta, opted out of having its shares tokenized on the venue, with 67 companies in all joining them.

Research suggests that appetite for tokenized stocks is real but uneven. A study by the International Monetary Fund found that tokenized stocks show genuine demand yet remain volatile and illiquid — a reminder that the infrastructure may be arriving faster than the markets needed to fill it. The findings underscore that while interest in onchain equities exists, liquidity and stability have yet to keep pace with the infrastructure buildout.