SEC opens door to tokenized U.S. stock trading. Here’s who could benefit

Those models would need to change if providers want to use the SEC’s new U.S. pathway.

Robinhood’s crypto head, Johann Kerbrat, nevertheless welcomed the agency’s move.

“The SEC innovation exemption is a signal that tokenization is ready to come to the United States,” Kerbrat said. “This is a major step by the agency and will allow liquid tokenized securities markets to develop onshore.”

Robinhood’s shares are up about 2.8% on Thursday.

A regulated lane for DeFi

The other potentially significant opening is for regulated DeFi trading platforms.

Under the exemption, tokenized securities venues can use automated market makers, or AMMs, to trade tokenized U.S. stocks without registering as traditional securities exchanges. Meanwhile, centralized crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken might be outside of the SEC’s framework. Coinbase shares rose about 5% on Thursday. Kraken is a private company.

The move could bring more activity to the blockchains and decentralized trading applications underneath those markets, said Zach Pandl, head of research at Grayscale.

“The innovation exemption will bring more utility of tokenized assets, benefiting users, leading public blockchains, including Ethereum , Solana (SOL), and BNB Chain , and decentralized trading applications such as Uniswap (UNI), Aerodrome (AERO), and Raydium ,” Pandl said.

The technology can run on public, permissionless blockchains, but access to the market itself must be controlled. In practice, that could start to create a regulated version of DeFi for U.S. securities, using some of crypto’s existing trading technology but with KYC, trading limits and securities-market oversight layered on top.