Igloo Inc., the company behind the Pudgy Penguins NFT brand, has built a financial instrument designed to let crypto tokens trade as registered securities on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. CEO Luca Netz disclosed the development on June 17 during an appearance on the Uneasy Money podcast.
The catch: actually getting a token listed this way requires traditional financial underwriting from firms like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. That process carries an estimated price tag of $10-20 million, a sum that would price out the vast majority of crypto projects before they even reach the starting line.
How the instrument works
The structure promises one-to-one trading parity with existing crypto markets. In English: if a token trades at $50 on a decentralized exchange, it should trade at $50 on the NYSE through this instrument, without the premium or discount that often plagues crypto-adjacent products in traditional finance.
It also includes onchain redemption capabilities, meaning holders could theoretically convert their exchange-listed position back into the underlying crypto token. And perhaps most notably, it enables direct revenue distributions from protocols to token holders, something that existing ETF wrappers simply cannot do.
