TL;DR
- Today the SEC issued a five-year order letting tokenized stocks trade in the U.S. on public, permissionless blockchains, without the venue registering as a stock exchange.
- Liquidity providers quoting into those pools are exempt from dealer registration.
- The tokens must be the real shares, with the same dividends and votes. Synthetic tokens are out of scope.
- The architecture is already live on Solana.
Internet Capital Markets got a rulebook today
The order creates a new kind of venue, a Tokenized Securities Venue, that brings buyers and sellers together through AMM pools and is exempt from the Exchange Act's definition of "exchange." Because it is not an exchange, Regulation NMS does not apply to it: no trade-through rule, no penny ticks, no quote collection. Trades settle onchain, pools run around the clock, shares can be fractional, and the paired asset can be a payment stablecoin. Investors hold the tokens in their own wallets.
Three conditions must be met:
- The smart contracts must be auditable, public, and deployed on a public, permissionless distributed ledger.
- Every participant must be permissioned, whether at the pool or at the token itself.
- The token has to carry the same rights as the listed share: the same dividends, the same vote, the same claim in a liquidation. A token that tracks a price is not a stock and does not qualify.
The order says "public" and "permissionless," and it asks every venue to publish who can pause, upgrade or override the contracts it runs on. For a network with a single sequencer, or a validator set chosen by a company, that is a longer conversation with the staff. Ledgers built for permissioned institutional pilots stay in that lane. Solana's answer fits on one line.
This is not a plan. It is running.
In April 2025 the Solana Policy Institute, Superstate and Orca walked into the SEC's Crypto Task Force with a design: tokenized shares recorded by an SEC-registered transfer agent using the blockchain as its official record, an allowlist enforced at the token level, and trading through non-custodial AMM pools on a public network. 17 months of meetings later, that design is the shape of the order.
It is also the shape of what already trades here. Forward Industries' tokenized common stock has traded on Orca since November 2025, with Superstate as transfer agent maintaining the allowlist through Solana's token extensions. Solana has hosted more than half of all tokenized equity volume in 2026. The order describes token-level permissioning as an accepted way to meet its access requirement; transfer hooks have done that job on Solana for a year.
The same morning, the CFTC extended its no-action relief for Phantom to every self-custodial wallet and front end that passively connects users to regulated derivatives markets. Two agencies, one day, the same conclusion: software that never touches a user's assets is not the intermediary the old rules were written for.
What it means for builders
- Anyone who wants to operate a venue needs a U.S. entity, a public notice 30 days before launch, and the ability to halt when the listing exchange halts. That is a compliance product waiting to be built.
- Market makers can quote into permissioned pools without registering as dealers, subject to disclosure and recordkeeping. Liquidity has a legal path.
- Issuers can tokenize natively through a transfer agent with no waiting period. Third-party tokens need the issuer's notice and a 30-day window.
- The volume caps are real, and the relief is temporary. The SEC is asking whether to make it permanent. Anyone building here should say so.
Markets went electronic. Money went digital. Today the regulator of the world's largest equity market said stocks can trade on a public blockchain. The network that can carry them is already doing it.
Stocks Go Onchain: What the SEC's Innovation Exemption Means for Solana was written by Miller Whitehouse-Levine, the founder and CEO of Solana Policy Institute (SPI). SPI is a non-profit organization devoted to advocating for public policies that allow blockchain networks like Solana to flourish.
