The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a five-year order allowing fully-privileged tokenized stocks to trade on public blockchains, exempting them from stock exchange registration. The order creates a new type of "tokenized securities trading venue" that matches buyers and sellers through automated market maker (AMM) pools and is exempt from the definition of "exchange" under the Exchange Act, thus not subject to Regulation NMS rules. Trades can be settled on-chain, pools operate 24/7, stocks can be fractionalized, and stablecoins are supported as pairing assets for payments. Investors can hold tokens in their own wallets.
Since November 2025, the Solana ecosystem, through Superstate as transfer agent, has hosted tokenized common stock trading for Forward Industries on Orca, and by 2026, it carried over half of the tokenized equity trading volume. The order explicitly accepts token-level permission controls to meet access requirements, a feature Solana's token extensions have provided for a year. On the same day, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) also expanded its "no-action" exemption for self-custody wallets like Phantom, indicating regulators view software that does not touch user assets as not falling under traditional intermediary rules.