The US Securities and Exchange Commission has cleared a path for stocks to trade directly on public blockchains — no broker, no traditional exchange license required. The order took effect on September 17 and runs for five years.
The relief covers a new category of trading venues, which the SEC calls Tokenized Securities Venues. Instead of conventional market makers, liquidity comes from smart contracts and automated market-maker pools — the same mechanism DeFi has used for years, now applied to ordinary shares of companies listed on Nasdaq and the NYSE.
The exemption comes with strings attached. Venues must cap the number of tickers and trading volume, guarantee token holders the same rights as regular shareholders, disclose their operations publicly, and, crucially, halt trading in a token the moment the underlying stock halts on its primary exchange. Smart contracts have to sit on public, auditable blockchains. Synthetic instruments that merely track a stock's price without conferring real ownership are excluded, and any issuer can simply opt its shares out of the whole system.
The timing isn't coincidental. Just two days earlier, the Senate voted down the CLARITY Act, the bill meant to give crypto markets a single federal rulebook, falling one vote short at 49-50. SEC Chair Paul Atkins was blunt about the connection: since Congress couldn't move the legislation, the agency used the authority it already has instead.
The SEC insists this is a temporary bridge, not permanent policy — it's collecting public comment while it drafts durable rules. But for a tokenization market already holding hundreds of billions of dollars through platforms tied to BlackRock, DTCC and Circle, a real legal on-ramp for Wall Street stocks onto public blockchains is a far more concrete step than another bill stalled in the Senate.
