A small aerospace company near Toulouse is about to make financial history. ST Group, which manufactures high-performance composite parts for Airbus and Dassault Aviation, will become the first traditional company in the world to conduct a fully on-chain initial public offering.
The listing is set 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,” said Lise CEO Mark Kepeneghian.
The Regulatory Foundation
Before this IPO could happen, France had to build the legal infrastructure to support it.
Lise received a DLT TSS licence 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 critical step that took years of coordination.
The approval was reached in coordination 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 that normally sit in separate institutions, a trading venue and a central securities depository, on a single blockchain infrastructure. The platform received regulatory approval from French authorities in late 2024.
The process for investors is straightforward. They register, transfer funds which are automatically converted into tokenised deposits, and subscribe with a single click. The minimum investment is one share. There are no subscription or custody fees on the primary market.
An investment bank and institutional investors are involved throughout, making this a genuine IPO process rather than crowdfunding. The only difference is that everything happens on-chain.
Europe Is Moving While Others Are Talking
Lise says neither Securitize in the United States nor SIX Group in Switzerland has completed a comparable fully on-chain IPO. Despite significant noise from American players around tokenisation, the first execution has come from Paris.
When Nasdaq itself has described tokenisation as the future of market infrastructure, a French exchange beating everyone to the milestone carries weight.
Kepeneghian is clear about who this platform is built for. European industrial SMEs have long been caught in a funding gap, too small for traditional exchanges and too established for crowdfunding. Lise is designed specifically for that space.
Three to four additional IPOs are already in the pipeline before the end of 2026.
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