Archax's regulated-tokenization bet: FCA first, then FINRA opens the US gateway

FCA-regulated digital securities exchange, broker and custodian in London, running a multi-chain tokenization engine for money market funds and other real-world assets.

Tokenized securities would only scale inside regulated wrappers — so Archax would become the licensed exchange, custodian and bridge in every major jurisdiction.

£24M in new funds at a £150M ($170M) valuation with abrdn investing (Ledger Insights, 2022); an undisclosed investment from the Stellar Development Foundation (August 2025); acquired BaFin-regulated Deutsche Digital Assets (July 2025)

Archax was co-founded in London by Graham Rodford to do the unglamorous part first: licences. In August 2020 the FCA authorized it as the world's first digital securities multilateral trading facility, alongside broker and cash-and-asset custodian approvals — what co-founder Matthew Pollard called a 'one-stop-shop' for a market barely out of the lab, with 35 tokenized issuances already in the pipeline.

The licenses aged well. abrdn invested at a $170M valuation, and when the tokenization wave hit — the RWA market roughly doubling in a year to $26B — Archax was the venue institutions could touch. It integrated the Stellar chain and launched a tokenized abrdn money market fund, drawing an investment from the Stellar Development Foundation (August 2025); bought BaFin-regulated Deutsche Digital Assets to reach European crypto ETPs (July 2025); and allied with GenTwo to tokenize structured products across Ethereum, Hedera, Solana, Stellar and Canton (May 2026). The capstone came on September 8, 2026: FINRA approved and the SEC registered Archax Markets as a US broker-dealer, letting Archax's UK and Spanish entities market tokenized private placements to US institutions under SEC Rule 15a-6 — a regulated bridge between European issuance and American demand.

In regulated markets, permission is scarce: holding the first FCA digital securities licences made Archax the default venue long before tokenization had volume.

Every new jurisdiction stacked rather than replaced the last — FCA, then BaFin via acquisition, then CNMV, then FINRA/SEC — compounding into a multi-market gateway competitors must rebuild.

Chain-agnosticism kept asset managers comfortable: the same tokenization engine and custody served five networks instead of forcing a bet on one.

Buying regulated entities (Deutsche Digital Assets) rather than applying from scratch turned years of approval timelines into months of integration.

When regulators open new lanes, the licences themselves become the product: Archax sold regulated rails across four jurisdictions instead of betting on any single token or chain.

As of September 8, 2026, Archax operates as a regulated exchange, broker, custodian and tokenization platform across the UK, EU and now the US, with Archax Markets registered as a broker-dealer and expected to begin US operations within the month — positioned as the two-way gateway for European tokenized securities and US institutional money.