Details
- The SEC issued a five-year conditional exemption allowing qualifying Tokenized Securities Venues to facilitate trading in tokenized U.S. stocks without registering as traditional exchanges.
- The framework covers public, permissionless blockchains, permissioned participants, auditable smart contracts, and liquidity providers that meet disclosure and recordkeeping requirements.
- Eligible tokens must represent the underlying shares and carry identical dividend, voting, and liquidation rights; synthetic price-tracking tokens are excluded.
- Trading can occur through automated market-maker pools, settle onchain around the clock, support fractional ownership, and use stablecoins as paired assets, while Regulation NMS exchange requirements do not apply.
- Solana’s model is already operating: Forward Industries’ tokenized stock has traded on Orca since November 2025, with Superstate serving as transfer agent and enforcing token-level access controls.
Impact
The order gives blockchain venues, issuers, and liquidity providers a defined—but temporary and volume-capped—compliance path for secondary equity trading. Over the next 12–24 months, it is likely to steer tokenization investment toward public-chain infrastructure, transfer-agent integrations, identity and permissioning systems, and automated compliance controls, while private-ledger projects remain outside the framework.
