Tokenization vs. Native Coins: What MLRT Brings That Wrapped Securities Cannot

Source reviewed: Chairman Paul S. Atkins — Keynote Address at the Crypto Task Force Roundtable on Tokenization (May 12, 2025).

In May 2025, the SEC's Crypto Task Force held a roundtable titled "Tokenization: Moving Assets Onchain — Where TradFi and DeFi Meet." Chairman Paul Atkins delivered the keynote. He compared the on-chain migration of financial assets to the transition of audio recordings from vinyl to cassette to digital — a long-running format change rather than a single moment.

The keynote is worth reading carefully because it makes a distinction that often gets blurred in crypto discourse: tokenizing an existing security is not the same as building a native crypto asset. Both belong on-chain. But they are not the same kind of object, and they should not be regulated the same way.

For Malairt (MLRT) — a Bitcoin-style proof-of-work coin with a fixed monetary policy and no foundation — the keynote's framing matters because it implicitly defines what a native coin is and what it is not.

What Atkins's keynote argued

A few themes:

Tokenization is migration, not transformation. A tokenized share of stock is still a share of stock. The legal nature of the underlying instrument doesn't change because the database changed.
Securities, when tokenized, remain securities. The SEC's job for tokenized securities is to write rules that make on-chain issuance, custody, and trading work — not to pretend the wrapper changes the legal nature of the asset.
Three regulatory areas need clarity: issuance, custody, and trading.
The future is rule-based, not enforcement-based. Market participants should be able to read the rules and design accordingly.

Paraphrased: securities migrating to on-chain databases are like recordings migrating from vinyl to cassette to digital — a format change, not a category change. A tokenized security is still a security.

That last point is exactly the line that distinguishes tokenized securities from native crypto assets.

The category distinction that matters

Crypto assets, in the working taxonomy that the SEC has been sketching across 2025 speeches, fall into roughly four buckets. Two of them are particularly relevant here:

Tokenized securities. A share of stock, a bond, a fund interest, or another financial instrument that exists as a legal claim and is being represented on a blockchain database. The blockchain is plumbing; the asset's legal nature is unchanged.
Native crypto assets / digital commodities / network tokens. Coins or tokens whose existence is intrinsic to the operation of an open, decentralized network. They are not a wrapper around something else. They are the thing.

A tokenized share of Apple stock is the first. MLRT is the second. They share the property of being on-chain. They share almost nothing else.

What a native coin brings that a wrapped security cannot

This is the part of the conversation that often gets lost. A tokenized security is useful — for settlement speed, for global accessibility, for composability with other on-chain systems. But it inherits all the legal complexity of the underlying instrument. A native commodity coin brings something different.

Permissionless transferability at the protocol layer. A native coin moves when a valid signature meets the consensus rules. There is no whitelist, no transfer agent, no securities-law overlay required for the basic transfer to be valid. A tokenized security, even on-chain, retains its securities-law transfer restrictions: who can hold it, who can buy it, what disclosures are required, what records must be kept.

No issuer counterparty risk. A tokenized security is a representation of a claim against an issuer. If the issuer fails, the underlying claim becomes complicated regardless of what the on-chain token says. A native coin is not a claim against anyone. The MLRT in your wallet is the asset; there is no off-chain counterparty whose solvency matters.

Protocol-defined monetary policy. A native coin has its monetary policy in code. MLRT's 50-coin initial subsidy and 210,000-block halving cycle are properties of the protocol, not policy decisions of an issuer. A tokenized security's "monetary policy" is the issuing entity's capital structure — issuance is at the issuer's discretion.

Native to its security model. A native coin's security comes from the same network that produces it. MLRT's security budget is paid in MLRT, by the protocol, to miners contributing real computational work. A tokenized security's security depends on the legal infrastructure that backs the underlying claim — the issuer's record-keeping, the custody chain, the dispute-resolution venues — even when the token itself lives on a blockchain.

Independent of any single chain or vendor. A native coin lives on its own chain. The chain is the asset's home. A tokenized security can in principle be re-issued on a different chain, but doing so is a legal act involving the issuer. The token is a representation; the legal asset is elsewhere.

Where MLRT specifically sits

Consider MLRT against this distinction:

MLRT is the asset, not a wrapper around an asset. There is no off-chain instrument that the on-chain MLRT represents. The on-chain MLRT is the MLRT.
MLRT has no issuer. No company minted it. There is no balance sheet behind it. The supply is produced by miners, governed by code.
MLRT's transfer rules are the protocol's rules. Not securities-law transfer restrictions, not transfer-agent rules. Just signatures and consensus.
MLRT's monetary policy is fixed. 50 MLRT initial subsidy, halving every 210,000 blocks at a 2-minute target. Policy by code, not by committee.
MLRT's security model is endogenous. Miners earn MLRT by producing valid blocks; the security budget is built into the protocol.

Each of those properties is what makes MLRT a native coin in Atkins's distinction. None of them is available to a tokenized security, because a tokenized security is, by definition, a representation of something that exists in a different legal universe.

Why this distinction matters for users

For a user, the difference between holding a tokenized security and holding a native coin is not just regulatory cosmetics. It changes what you actually own.

If you hold a tokenized share of stock:

You own a claim against the issuer.
Your on-chain token is a representation of that claim, governed by the legal documents underneath.
Your transfer rights are constrained by securities law and by the issuer's program.
Custody arrangements are governed by securities law plus the on-chain technology.

If you hold MLRT:

You own MLRT. There is no claim against anyone.
Your on-chain UTXO is the asset.
Your transfer rights are the protocol's rules, no more, no less.
Custody is whatever you make of it: full self-custody is the default; custodial arrangements are optional.

Both can be valuable. They are simply different things.

What this means for the regulatory landscape

The SEC's emerging posture, across the 2025 and 2026 speeches, is that the agency's job is to regulate securities — including tokenized securities — and to step back from native crypto assets that are not securities. Atkins's tokenization keynote was an early statement of the first half of that posture: the SEC will engage seriously with the migration of securities on-chain. The taxonomy speeches that followed (most clearly the November 2025 Inside Project Crypto address) made the second half explicit: native commodity coins are not, by default, in the agency's lane.

For MLRT, the practical effect is that the network operates in the second category. The questions that matter for tokenized-security infrastructure — issuer identity, transfer agents, custody under the Advisers Act, broker-dealer status — are largely not the questions that apply to a born-mined commodity coin.

What this means for MLRT users

MLRT is a native asset, not a wrapper. It is its own thing, not a representation of anything off-chain.
No issuer counterparty risk. There is no company whose solvency you are betting on.
The protocol is the legal architecture. Your MLRT moves when you sign and the network confirms.
Tokenized securities and native coins are both valuable. They are not interchangeable, and they should not be regulated identically.

References

Keynote Address at the Crypto Task Force Roundtable on Tokenization — Chairman Paul S. Atkins, 2025-05-12

This article is editorial commentary published by the Malairte project. It is not legal or investment advice and does not represent the views of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or any of its staff or commissioners.