Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.
GM!
Today’s top news:
- Crypto majors mostly red, HYPE leads; BTC at $63.4k
- Bitcoin spot trading volume falls to 7-year low
- Goldman Sachs buys a BTC income ETF with $2.25B NEOS deal
- Solana came close to going down after routing bug
- Hyperliquid adds new function to handle tokenized stock functions like splits, dividends
🏛️ The SEC Moves to Bless the Onchain Stock Market Without Congress
The SEC is preparing to do on its own what Congress couldn’t.
Per Bloomberg, the SEC will roll out two crypto initiatives in the coming days while the CLARITY Act sits stalled until at least September. First, a Friday open meeting to propose “Regulation Crypto,” a framework letting projects raise capital through token sales without full securities registration. Second, and bigger for onchain markets, an “innovation exemption” for tokenized stocks, with details possibly dropping Friday.
The exemption would let tokenized versions of stocks like Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia trade on blockchains around the clock, in fractional sizes, with near-instant settlement. The tokens typically track a stock’s economic exposure but carry no voting or dividend rights (though some protocols are working on solving the voting and dividend rights), which is what justifies the lighter regulatory treatment. It’s the core of Chair Paul Atkins’ “Project Crypto” agenda.
This lands squarely on the year’s biggest onchain growth story. Tokenized stocks have been the engine behind Robinhood Chain, whose RWA volume jumped fivefold this summer, and a major push across Solana and Base. The NYSE is building its own onchain settlement platform, BlackRock launched tokenized funds on Solana and Ethereum, and Circle’s Arc lined up BlackRock, Visa, and Mastercard as validators. All of it has run in a regulatory gray zone, much of it routed to non-US users. A formal SEC exemption would hand that entire movement the legal clarity it’s been missing, potentially opening US retail access to the products these chains were built for.
If this comes through as expected, it could be one of the more bullish crypto news events in years. The RWA meta gets a full green light, and all the tokenized asset growth targets get amplified. Let’s hope this one is not a letdown…
