Real stocks are finally coming on blockchain. Here’s how the SEC wants it to work — SkimNews
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- SEC launched a five-year "innovation exemption" letting qualified Tokenized Securities Venues (TSVs) trade real U.S. stocks on public blockchains via smart contracts and liquidity pools, without registering as national securities exchanges.
- Tokenized shares must carry the same voting, dividend, and ownership rights as the underlying stock; synthetic instruments that merely track share prices are excluded from the sandbox.
- Tesla illustrates the cap math — with roughly 40 million average daily shares, a qualifying venue could theoretically handle about 100,000 tokenized Tesla shares per day (~$36.6M at $366), under Tier 1 limits of 75 names and 0.25% of ADV.
- AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron publicly criticized Robinhood for offering AMC-linked stock tokens without company involvement — the kind of dispute the SEC's new 30-day pre-listing notice and issuer veto is designed to prevent.
- Liquidity providers supplying assets to automated market maker pools receive conditional relief from dealer registration, though leverage and lending on TSVs are explicitly barred.
- Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo called the framework "a super good middle ground" that lets crypto firms plug automated market makers into regulated U.S. equities markets, while SEC trading-and-markets director Jamie Selway framed the cap structure as "a modest start" to "measure the effect."
Why it matters: The framework gives crypto infrastructure firms a legal U.S. path into regulated equity trading for the first time — but with issuer veto rights and tight limits (0.25% of Tesla's ADV at Tier 1), incumbents like NYSE and Nasdaq keep their grip while TSVs serve as a parallel test track. The biggest shift: public companies themselves now hold an explicit veto over third-party tokenization of their own shares.
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