SEC Opens a Five-Year Path for Tokenized US Stocks to Trade On-Chain

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has granted a temporary exemption that lets tokenized United States equities trade on permissioned blockchain venues for five years, on the condition that each token carries the same economic, voting, dividend and liquidation rights as the share it represents. The order sets investor rights ahead of trading mechanics and excludes synthetic products that offer price exposure without ownership, which is the structure most offshore tokenized-stock offerings have used.

The conditions matter more than the headline permission. Venues must publish their smart contracts, honor coordinated trading halts with the primary listing markets, and give the underlying issuer written notice at least 30 calendar days before listing its tokens, with an issuer objection inside that window blocking the listing. Unchained reported that the relief is meant as a temporary measure ahead of permanent rulemaking, not a settled regime.

The unresolved problem is pricing. Regular trading on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq covers about 32.5 hours of each 168-hour week, so an automated market maker quoting a tokenized share for the remaining hours has no live reference price. RedStone's chief operating officer Marcin Kazmierczak told crypto.news that oracle design, not legal permission, now decides whether these markets price correctly overnight and at weekends.

The timing is deliberate. The exemption arrived days after the Senate rejected the Clarity Act and as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sent its own crypto market rules to the White House. Money is already moving into venues built for this product category: Robinhood Chain holds $3.00 billion in total value secured on L2Beat, up 7.3% over seven days, with $986.2 million of decentralized finance value locked measured by DeFiLlama.