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Door Remote - 17 Sep 2026
Where would these stocks trade?They would trade on qualifying TSVs operating under the SEC exemption.
The blockchain underneath can be public, but the trading environment itself remains permissioned and subject to the SEC's conditions.
The qualified venues can use automated market makers, or AMMs, where investors trade against pools of assets controlled by software rather than relying solely on the traditional exchange model of matching individual buy and sell orders.
The SEC is also granting certain liquidity providers conditional relief from dealer registration requirements so they can supply assets (or liquidity) to those pools.
That's important because an AMM isn't much use without somebody putting stocks and cash into it.
The bigger disruption may ultimately be for exchanges themselves.
The SEC has effectively created a temporary category of stock-trading venue that can bring buyers and sellers together without first becoming another NYSE or Nasdaq. What this exemption will now allow is that the industry can test whether that DeFi-style model can work for regulated U.S. equities.
However, calling this “DeFi for stocks” requires an asterisk.
The technology may look like DeFi — public blockchains, smart contracts, automated market makers and liquidity pools — but the access model does not. Participants still have to be permissioned, meaning retail investors, institutions and broker-dealers can all potentially participate if they meet the venue's access requirements.
The blockchain underneath can be public, but the trading environment itself remains permissioned and subject to the SEC's conditions.
The qualified venues can use automated market makers, or AMMs, where investors trade against pools of assets controlled by software rather than relying solely on the traditional exchange model of matching individual buy and sell orders.
The SEC is also granting certain liquidity providers conditional relief from dealer registration requirements so they can supply assets (or liquidity) to those pools.
That's important because an AMM isn't much use without somebody putting stocks and cash into it.
The bigger disruption may ultimately be for exchanges themselves.
The SEC has effectively created a temporary category of stock-trading venue that can bring buyers and sellers together without first becoming another NYSE or Nasdaq. What this exemption will now allow is that the industry can test whether that DeFi-style model can work for regulated U.S. equities.
However, calling this “DeFi for stocks” requires an asterisk.
The technology may look like DeFi — public blockchains, smart contracts, automated market makers and liquidity pools — but the access model does not. Participants still have to be permissioned, meaning retail investors, institutions and broker-dealers can all potentially participate if they meet the venue's access requirements.