The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has extended its timeline to decide the fate of the Boston Security Token Exchange (BSTX), an affiliation of Overstock’s Blockchain arm tZero.
As mentioned in the April 1 published order, the decision to extend the April 2 deadline was taken as the platform proposed a rule change to its original filing.
“The Commission asks that commenters address the sufficiency of the Exchange’s statements in support of the proposal, which are set forth in the Notice,72 in addition to any other comments they may wish to submit about the proposed rule change,” the document noted.
The original rule change proposals were made last year, however, the exchange also made another amendment to one of the proposals, increasing the number of its operating markets and listing standards.
The agency wants to analyze the changes and warned that hurdles like this would lead to disqualification.
Challenging the traditional equities market
BSTX is a joint initiative by BOX and tZero and is targeting the token securitization arena.
In the SEC filing, it describes itself as “a fully automated, price-time priority Execution system to list and trade NMS stocks that meet BSTX listing standards and for which ancillary records of ownership reflecting certain end-of-day security token balances as reported by market participants would be created and maintained using distributed ledger technology.”
The securities agency received two comments on the filing, one of which raised concerns with the platform's potential to bring “significant change for the equities market.” Moreover, the commentator also wanted further disclosure of its relationship with tZero.
Another letter highlighted the 85 percent drop of Overstock’s token value over the past couple of years.
Both the commentators wanted the regulator to spend more time before approving or rejecting BSTX’s proposal.
