The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has granted temporary, conditional relief allowing a new category of venue to trade tokenised US equities without registering as an exchange.
The move comes two days after the ClarityAct – a proposal designed to establish a regulatory framework for digital assets – stalled in the Senate.
Under the order, issued on Thursday, so-called Tokenised Securities Venues (TSVs) are exempt from the definition of “exchange” under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 when they bring together buyers and sellers of tokenised National Market System (NMS) stock through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools.
Trade associations have been previously wary of this approach. In submissions to the SEC late last year, SIFMA warned that broad relief risked creating “parallel, but unequal trading ecosystems for substantively identical assets”, while the World Federation of Exchanges said it was “alarmed” at platforms marketing so-called tokenised US stocks.
Cboe argued that rulemaking rather than exemptive relief would better “ensure a level playing field amongst market participants and preserve the integrated national market system”.
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