The SEC has granted a five-year conditional exemption letting tokenized stocks trade on permissioned onchain venues, and the CFTC has opened its passive-software no-action relief to more providers. Both moves landed hours apart on Thursday, two days after the Senate blocked the CLARITY Act.
The SEC and CFTC issued crypto exemptions within hours of each other on Thursday, the first concrete use of authorities both chairmen had invoked after the Senate refused to take up the market structure bill. The Securities and Exchange Commission granted temporary relief from the definition of "exchange" to a new category it calls a Tokenized Securities Venue, letting tokenized National Market System stock trade onchain through permissioned liquidity pools. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission separately told passive software providers they need not register as introducing brokers.
Neither Relief Is Permanent
The Senate rejected cloture on H.R. 3633 by a 49-50 vote on Tuesday, 11 votes short of the 60 required. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said the Commission is "taking a significant step forward, within its statutory authority". But the SEC order expires five years after publication, and the Commission can amend or withdraw it earlier. A CFTC staff no-action position binds only the division that wrote it.
Caps Limit Onchain Trading
A venue may list 75 Tier 1 symbols — S&P 500 and Russell 1000 stocks and certain exchange-traded products — and trade up to 0.25% of the prior month's average daily volume in each. Tier 2 covers 250 remaining NMS stocks at a 2.5% cap, and breaching a volume cap triggers a three-month trading pause in that security. Venues must run publicly auditable smart contracts on public ledgers. They must also halt trading whenever the primary listing exchange halts the underlying stock.
Before listing stock tokenized by an unaffiliated third party, a venue must notify the issuer and wait at least 30 calendar days. A written objection filed in that window bars the listing. Uniswap's UNI token traded at $7.37 on Thursday afternoon, up 19.8% over 24 hours, after Uniswap Labs launched the permissioned automated market maker architecture the order contemplates. Bitcoin traded at $76,558, up 1.2%.
Industry Groups Split On Scope
Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger called the order a step toward modernizing U.S. capital markets. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association had argued against broad relief in a November 26 letter, warning that categorical exemptions risk creating parallel but unequal trading ecosystems. Commissioner Hester Peirce drew a boundary of her own, saying the order is not about decentralized finance. She said truly decentralized systems driven by automated software do not raise the foundational concerns underlying securities regulation.
The SEC is soliciting comment on the exemption, with the deadline set once the order publishes in the Federal Register.
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