SEC approves tokenized stock trading on permissionless blockchains for five years

The SEC issued a five-year order permitting tokenized shares to trade on public, permissionless blockchains without the trading venue registering as an exchange. The order also exempts liquidity providers quoting into those pools from dealer registration, and Solana says the infrastructure it describes is already running on its network.

• Tokens must carry the same dividends, votes and liquidation claims as the underlying share
• Venue operators need a U.S. entity and must give 30 days’ public notice before launch
• Solana says it hosted more than half of all tokenized equity trading volume in 2026

• 5 years duration of the SEC’s new exemptive order
• 30 days notice period required before a venue can launch
• 17 months between the initial SEC proposal and the order

The Securities and Exchange Commission created a new venue category, called a Tokenized Securities Venue, that is exempt from the Exchange Act’s definition of “exchange” and therefore from Regulation NMS, according to a post by Solana Policy Institute’s Miller Whitehouse-Levine, the release. Trades settle onchain, pools run continuously, shares can be fractional and the paired asset can be a payment stablecoin. Investors hold the tokens themselves rather than through a broker.

What the order actually requires

Contracts run by these venues must be “auditable, public, and deployed on a public, permissionless distributed ledger,” per the release. Every participant must be permissioned, either at the pool or at the token level, and each token must match the real share’s dividend, voting and liquidation rights. Synthetic price-tracking tokens do not qualify.

Venue operators must disclose who can pause, upgrade or override their contracts.

Networks with a single sequencer or a company-picked validator set face what the release calls “a longer conversation with the staff.”

Forward Industries and 17 months of meetings

The release traces the order back to an April 2025 pitch to the SEC’s Crypto Task Force from the Solana Policy Institute, Superstate and Orca, proposing transfer-agent-recorded shares, token-level allowlists and non-custodial AMM trading.

Forward Industries’ tokenized common stock has traded on Orca since November 2025, with Superstate acting as transfer agent maintaining the allowlist via Solana’s token extensions.

The same design now defines what qualifies under the order.

Market makers, issuers and the CFTC’s same-day move

Liquidity providers quoting into permissioned pools are exempt from dealer registration, subject to disclosure and recordkeeping, the release states. Issuers can tokenize shares natively through a transfer agent with no waiting period; third parties tokenizing someone else’s stock need the issuer’s notice and the 30-day window.

The CFTC separately extended its no-action relief for Phantom to any self-custodial wallet that passively connects users to regulated derivatives markets, per the same release.

What the release doesn’t say

The document does not state the size of the volume caps it says are “real,” nor does it link to the SEC’s order text, a release number or a docket. It also does not say whether the exemption will be made permanent; the release notes only that “the SEC is asking whether to make it permanent.”

Worth flagging: this account is written by the founder of the Solana Policy Institute, the group that proposed the design, and published on Solana’s site.

“The tokens must be the real shares, with the same dividends and votes. Synthetic tokens are out of scope.”

Solana Foundation release

What changes for builders and traders

For Solana, the practical shift is legal cover for something already operating: Orca’s AMM pools, Superstate’s transfer-agent allowlists and Forward Industries’ listed token have run since November 2025 without this order.

What changes is that a market maker can now quote into those pools without a dealer license, and a new venue operator can launch by filing notice 30 days out instead of negotiating exchange registration.

Compared with the prior posture, where tokenized-equity trading sat in a gray zone tolerated rather than authorized, this order gives a five-year runway with defined conditions: permissioned access, matching shareholder rights, disclosed contract control.

Chains built for permissioned institutional pilots do not fit the “public, permissionless” test the order sets, which narrows who can compete for this flow.

The CCS read. An SEC order that legalizes what Orca and Superstate already built gives Solana a five-year head start most competing chains cannot match without redesigning around permissionless validator sets and public contract disclosure. The real fight now moves to whether the SEC keeps the caps and makes the exemption permanent.

Watch for the SEC’s decision on whether to convert the five-year exemptive order into permanent rulemaking, and for the first venue operators outside Orca to file the required 30-day public notice.