A small aerospace company near Toulouse is about to make financial history. ST Group, which produces high-performance composite parts for Airbus and Dassault Aviation, becomes the world’s first traditional company to conduct a fully on-chain IPO.
The listing is scheduled for April 9 on Lise, a French blockchain-powered exchange backed by BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole’s CACEIS and state investment bank Bpifrance.
“ST Group would never have done an IPO on a traditional market. Blockchain technology is the real answer to the structural financing problem for SMEs,” says Lise CEO Mark Kepeneghian.
The Regulation Foundation
Before this IPO could take place, France had to build the legal infrastructure to support it.
Lise received a DLT TSS license from the Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution, France’s financial regulator, under the EU’s DLT Pilot Regime. This regulatory sandbox allows blockchain-based financial infrastructure to operate within traditional legal frameworks, a crucial step that took years of coordination.
The approval was reached in consultation with the Banque de France, the European Securities and Markets Authority, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers and the European Central Bank.
How it actually works
Lise combines two functions normally housed in separate institutions, a trading platform and a central securities depository, on a single blockchain infrastructure. The platform received approval from the French authorities at the end of 2024.
The process for investors is simple. They register, transfer funds that are automatically converted into tokenized deposits, and subscribe with a single click. The minimum investment is one share. There are no registration or holding fees on the primary market.
There is an investment bank and institutional investors involved throughout, making this a true IPO process rather than crowdfunding. The only difference is that everything happens on-chain.
Europe moves while others talk
Lise says that neither Securitize in the United States nor SIX Group in Switzerland has completed a comparable, fully on-chain IPO. Despite a lot of noise from US players around tokenization, the first implementation has come from Paris.
When Nasdaq itself has described tokenization as the future of market infrastructure, a French exchange beating everyone for the milestone carries weight.
Kepeneghian is clear about who this platform is built for. European industrial SMEs have long been trapped in a financing gap, too small for traditional exchanges and too established for crowdfunding. Lise was specially designed for that space.
There are already three to four additional IPOs in the pipeline before the end of 2026.
Related: The US Treasury Department is seeking public comment on the GENIUS Stablecoin rules