17.10.2025 04:02
In a groundbreaking development for the European financial landscape, France has officially sanctioned the continent's first stock exchange built entirely on blockchain technology. Lightning Stock Exchange (Lise), an innovative platform designed for small and mid-sized enterprises, recently secured operational approval from French regulators. The Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution (ACPR), France’s esteemed banking and insurance oversight body, granted Lise a specialized DLT Trading and Settlement license. This pivotal authorization empowers Lise to integrate both trading and clearing functionalities within a singular blockchain system, marking a significant departure from the multi-layered structures that have characterized traditional exchanges for decades.
This visionary exchange is the creation of Kriptown, a dynamic fintech startup that enjoys substantial support from prominent French financial institutions, including BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, and Crédit Agricole’s Caceis. Mark Kepeneghian, Lise's managing director, articulated the company's straightforward yet ambitious objective: to streamline the capital-raising process, making it as swift and transparent as contemporary cryptocurrency transactions. Eschewing the complexities of conventional Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), Lise intends to facilitate the issuance and trading of company shares as tokenized assets, a method poised to dramatically reduce both costs and bureaucratic hurdles.
Anticipation is building for the platform's initial digital listings, which are slated for early 2026, with an additional ten or more offerings projected for 2027. Kepeneghian described this pioneering endeavor as a fundamental "rethink of how equity markets should work in a digital world." Issuers are expected to commence their onboarding process later this year in preparation for the upcoming launch. This pivotal initiative unfolds within the framework of the EU's DLT Pilot Regime, an regulatory blueprint established in 2023 specifically to explore and validate blockchain’s transformative potential within securities markets.
Should Lise prove successful, its operational model holds the promise of becoming a seminal blueprint for future exchanges, forging direct connections between investors and tokenized assets, thereby circumventing the need for conventional intermediaries. Caceis, a recent investor in Kriptown, affirmed that its stake underscores a broader strategic imperative to propel Europe’s financial ecosystem towards widespread tokenization. The timing of this advancement is exceptionally pertinent, as major financial hubs across Europe are aggressively pursuing modernization, with platforms like Kraken and Gemini already engaging in experiments with tokenized securities. For Paris, in particular, Lise stands as perhaps its most audacious stride into the future of finance.
