SEC Grants Five-Year Innovation Exemption for Tokenized US Stocks

This exemption is a structural concession rather than a deregulatory gesture: the SEC is effectively allowing tokenized NMS stock trading to exist in a sandbox with volume caps, permissioned pools and 30-day issuer notice, while preserving the registration regime it declined to waive. The timing, days after the CLARITY Act's narrow Senate defeat, suggests the agency is routing around legislative gridlock, which puts the burden on issuers and venue operators to satisfy nine conditions without statutory cover. Whether the volume caps bind before the five-year clock does — and whether issuers use the notice window to opt out — is the open question.