The SEC Cleared Stocks To Trade Onchain in the U.S.
A five-year exemption, a 75-symbol cap and an issuer veto — plus the CFTC opening its software carve-out to the whole industry
gm, Defiers!
These are the biggest stories in DeFi and crypto:
- The SEC cleared tokenized stocks to trade onchain as the CFTC widened software relief
- X put a U.S. "Trade" button on cashtags with Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini
- S&P Global agreed to buy OpenZeppelin and move into onchain code risk
- Polymarket hired ex-Zora CEO Jacob Horne as it rewrites its order book in Rust
- Blockworks will let exchanges take compliance alerts straight from AI agents
Two days after the Senate refused to take up the CLARITY Act, the SEC issued a five-year conditional exemption on Thursday letting tokenized National Market System stock trade onchain through permissioned liquidity pools. CFTC staff opened introducing-broker relief to passive software providers the same morning. Uniswap's token rose 19.8% over 24 hours.
The order creates a category the Commission calls a Tokenized Securities Venue and exempts it from the exchange definition in Section 3(a)(1) of the Exchange Act. A venue may list 75 Tier 1 symbols and trade up to 0.25% of each one's prior-month average daily volume; Tier 2 runs to 250 symbols at 2.5%. Breach a cap and that security pauses for three months. Venues halt when the primary listing exchange halts, publish 30 days of transaction data updated within 10 minutes, and give issuers 30 calendar days' notice before listing a third-party tokenization — a written objection filed by day 30 bars the listing outright.
Paul Atkins called the order an interim measure that "must be followed by durable rulemaking." Hester Peirce drew the line the industry will argue over for the next five years: the order "is not about decentralized finance," and permissionless smart contracts need no exemption at all. SIFMA spent last November warning the SEC that broad relief risks "parallel, but unequal trading ecosystems," and the comment file is open again.
Read more below!
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SEC Clears Tokenized Stocks To Trade Onchain As CFTC Widens Software Relief
Release No. 34-106402 exempts a Tokenized Securities Venue from the exchange definition and exempts certain liquidity providers from the dealer definition, with no relief from the antifraud provisions, from OFAC sanctions compliance or from Securities Act registration, and no primary issuance allowed. Tokenized shares must carry the same dividend rights, voting rights and claim on residual assets as the underlying stock, and third-party tokenizers must distribute proxy materials at no cost to the issuer or shareholders. Venues run publicly auditable smart contracts on public ledgers and notify the Commission within one business day of publishing their notice. Jamie Selway, who runs the SEC's Division of Trading and Markets, set out this framework and the two agencies' harmonization work earlier this year. At the CFTC, Staff Letter 26-25 extends to any passive software provider the position Phantom Technologies won alone in March, under ten conditions including joint liability with the broker and consent to Commission investigation. Uniswap Labs launched Permissioned Pools on v4 in July; UNI traded at $7.37 on Thursday afternoon.
Join us Sept 24: The Current State of Blockchain, Crypto, and Fintech
Join Sophia Zhao, Partner at Alumni Ventures, and Camila Russo, Founder of The Defiant, for a fireside conversation on the current state of blockchain, crypto, and fintech venture — where capital is deploying across the space, what the next generation of on-chain and financial infrastructure companies are actually building, and how accredited investors can gain structured exposure to one of the most active corners of private markets.
X Adds US 'Trade' Button to Cashtags With Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini
X opened a U.S. Cashtag Partner Program on Sept. 15 connecting supported stock, ETF and crypto pages to Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Interactive Brokers and Moomoo. Tapping a cashtag brings up a price chart and related posts; picking a brokerage hands the user to that firm's app or site, where they log in or open an account and the trade itself happens. Coverage differs by partner. Gemini's connection covers stocks plus five named tokens, ZEC, HYPE, BTC, ETH and SOL, while Kraken says U.S. users can tap any crypto cashtag and land on its catalog of more than 2,400 tokens. That 2,400 is Kraken's stated token catalog; X has published no cashtag count. X runs no market or limit orders and holds no customer assets: account access and transaction completion sit with the selected brokerage.
S&P Global to Acquire OpenZeppelin in Onchain Risk Push
OpenZeppelin keeps its name and runs as a separate business unit, with CEO Demian Brener reporting to Yann Le Pallec, president of S&P Global Ratings. Terms were not disclosed and the deal still needs closing conditions met. Founded in 2015, OpenZeppelin has run more than 900 security engagements and says those reviews surfaced more than 10,000 vulnerabilities before production, while S&P cites Contracts libraries underpinning more than $37 trillion in value transferred. The audit client list includes Uniswap, Aave, the Ethereum Foundation, Coinbase and DTCC. OpenZeppelin says released and future Contracts versions stay open source, free and maintained on GitHub, with the same audit team. S&P Ratings already grades crypto financial risk, cutting Tether's USDT stability assessment to 5, or weak, from 4 in November 2025, and the purchase carries that into the code layer under stablecoins, tokenized funds and DeFi protocols.
Polymarket Hires Ex-Zora CEO for Onchain Product Push
Shayne Coplan said the performance of Polymarket's onchain product has "waned" while the company scaled, and that longtime users read the U.S. build-out as a change of focus. Jacob Horne gets a broad product mandate weighted toward DeFi, with a town hall promised "soon" and no launch date, fee change or liquidity program attached to the announcement. The sharper diagnosis came from inside the company on Aug. 31, when vice president of DeFi engineering Josh Stevens called the central limit order book "full of tech debt" and wrote that "the codebase can't be saved long-term." The team scaled it tenfold and made it three times faster, then started over: the matching engine is being rewritten in Rust for mid-to-late Q4, with early benchmarks of 200,000 orders per second, about 15 times current capacity, and p99 latency 10 to 20 times better.
Blockworks Lets Exchanges Take Compliance Alerts Straight From AI Agents
Analyst verification took about five minutes per development. A model trained on seven years of Messari analyst coverage now flags the same events in seconds, and from Thursday a listings or compliance desk can act on the machine output before anyone checks it. Every alert carries a tag, Agent-detected or Analyst-verified, and Analyst-verified stays the default on every monitoring view, with customers switching Agentic Detection on one view at a time. The agents read X, GitHub, governance forums, Discord, Telegram, project blogs and more than 1,000 news sources across more than 1,000 assets, sorting each development into roughly 10 categories and 55 subcategories and shipping the source evidence with it. Blockworks bought Messari on June 12 for more than $10 million, against the roughly $300 million valuation the company carried in 2022. A majority of tier-one exchanges and custodians use Monitoring, Blockworks said, declining to name any of them.
Other Stories Worth Your Time
World Rolls Out Money App as Key Features Remain Country-Limited — World Money is live in more than 150 countries with balances across eight currencies, Bridge-powered virtual accounts that route a paycheck through Lead Bank into USDC on World Chain, and a Morpho-selected Earn function. Virtual accounts and Earn are limited to supported regions, the assets carry no government insurance, and World says it cannot reset a lost passkey.
Ondo's Oasis Pro Markets Joins DTCC's Fund/SERV Processing Network — Ondo's broker-dealer is the first tokenization company on a network that carries more than 85% of U.S. mutual fund transaction activity, replacing fund-by-fund integrations with one standardized connection. The joint release named no Ondo product, no distributor and no go-live date.
The Next Bull Run Could Be One Big Airdrop Away — Eleven airdrops worth $500 million or more have landed since UNI, and the ones that arrived before a rally had runway to recycle. The pipeline now runs through Polymarket's confirmed POLY token, the Base token Coinbase has been exploring since last year, and tokenless perp DEXs including Variational and Extended.
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