SEC Cracks Open the Door for Wall Street Stocks to Trade Onchain

Wall Street Gets an Onchain Test Drive

A U.S. stock can now enter territory normally associated with crypto trading. On Sept. 17, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved its temporary “Innovation Exemption,” allowing limited trading of tokenized NMS stocks through onchain automated market makers and liquidity pools.

The SEC isn’t simply waving everything through. It’s putting limits around the experiment, collecting the data, and watching what happens next in the tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) space.

Stocks Meet the Liquidity Pool

Under the exemption, qualifying Tokenized Securities Venues, or TSVs, receive temporary relief from concerns that their activities could make them an “exchange” under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

That means tokenized stocks can trade through automated market makers and liquidity pools, mechanisms better known from decentralized finance (defi). Instead of relying entirely on the traditional exchange structure, software and pools of capital can help facilitate trades.

There’s a catch. TSVs must meet conditions covering public notices, transaction transparency, trading-stoppage coordination, recordkeeping, and technology safeguards. Symbol limits and volume caps tied to limit up-limit down tiers also keep the experiment contained.

The SEC Wants to See the Receipts

The regulator also wants a detailed trail of what happens inside these markets. U.S. dollar-denominated transaction information must be publicly available at regular intervals, including price, size, time, and the liquidity pool’s address. End-of-day pool size and daily volume must be disclosed too.

In effect, the securities regulator is turning the experiment into a regulatory laboratory. Instead of writing permanent rules before seeing the machinery operate, regulators get to watch real trading and study the resulting data. SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda described the approach as a way to “experiment responsibly, learn, and translate old protections to new contexts.”

Liquidity Providers Get Their Own Lane

The exemption also offers tailored relief for certain liquidity providers putting their own capital into these markets, provided they satisfy disclosure and recordkeeping requirements.

Interestingly, Uyeda pointed to money market funds, index funds and exchange-traded funds as examples of products or models that benefited from SEC exemptive authority before becoming familiar parts of modern finance.

The Experiment Comes Before the Rulebook

The SEC is now asking for public feedback backed by metrics, case studies, incident analyses and experiences from live or test environments. On the other hand, whatever happens inside these tokenized markets could influence the permanent rules that eventually govern them.

Wall Street spent decades moving from paper certificates to electronic trading. Now the SEC is letting a controlled piece of it move into liquidity pools before the final rulebook has even been written.