The SEC is preparing to bless the onchain stock market on its own, bypassing a Congress that has stalled on crypto legislation until at least September.
Back
SEC readies tokenized stock exemption as RWA volume jumps fivefold
The SEC is preparing to bless the onchain stock market on its own, bypassing a Congress that has stalled on crypto legislation until at least September.
The SEC plans to propose an "innovation exemption" for tokenized stocks as soon as Friday, a move that would let versions of Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia trade on blockchains around the clock, Bloomberg reported.
"This demonstrates the model we are building for other public companies under existing regulations," Carlos Domingo, chairman and CEO of Securitize, said after the tokenization firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange in July.
The exemption would let tokenized equities trade in fractional sizes with near-instant settlement, though the tokens typically carry no voting or dividend rights. It lands as the CLARITY Act sits stalled until at least September and as onchain real-world-asset volume on Robinhood Chain jumped fivefold this summer. Securitize, the first tokenization company to go public, reported $5.3 billion in aggregate transaction volume in the second quarter, up 147 percent year over year, with roughly $5 billion in assets managed onchain.
A formal exemption would hand the tokenized-asset movement the legal clarity it has lacked, potentially opening US retail access to products that have largely routed to non-US users. Details could drop Friday, with a comment period to follow.
Regulation Crypto and the stalled CLARITY Act
The securities regulator has already scheduled an open meeting at 10:00 AM ET Friday to consider proposing "Regulation Crypto," a tailored offering regime for certain investment contracts involving crypto assets. The framework would grant registration exemptions of up to four years for crypto startups, allow fundraising up to a defined amount in any 12-month period without registration, and treat a token as a non-security once developers are no longer the driving force behind a project.
The tokenized-stock exemption is the larger of the two initiatives for onchain markets. The proposal could allow an issuer to object to any listing of a third-party tokenized version of its stock, and could mandate that platforms trading tokenized stocks be US entities with additional anti-money-laundering protections, according to people familiar with the agency's plans.
Infrastructure races ahead
The regulatory push lands on the year's biggest onchain growth story. The NYSE is building its own onchain settlement platform, BlackRock launched tokenized funds on Solana and Ethereum, and Circle's Arc lined up BlackRock, Visa, and Mastercard as validators. Hyperliquid is adding a "scaleWei" function that could let tokenized stocks handle corporate actions such as splits, dividends, and spin-offs onchain.
If the exemption comes through as expected, it could be one of the more bullish crypto regulatory events in years, expanding the growth targets for tokenized assets across Solana, Base, and Ethereum. The question now is whether the details match the ambition when the SEC meets Friday.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
