The first regulated venues for the onchain trading of tokenized U.S. stocks could begin taking shape as early as next quarter, senior Securities and Exchange Commission officials said in a joint interview published Monday. The comments give the market its first concrete timeline since the agency issued a five-year conditional relief order last week, and offer a public signal that firms are already positioning to run the new class of platform.
Taylor Lindman, chief counsel of the SEC Crypto Task Force, told the Crypto in America newsletter that he expects interested firms to begin publishing the operating notices required under the order in the coming months. Those notices will provide the first public indication of who intends to run a Tokenized Securities Venue, or TSV.
“I think there will be a bit of a lag time between when it came out and when we’ll see the first firms filing their notices,” Lindman said in the interview alongside Commissioner Hester Peirce. “That will probably be at some point in the next quarter.”
The remarks were reported on September 22, 2026, by journalist Eleanor Terrett, who co-hosts the Crypto in America podcast and newsletter. Crypto in America dated the newsletter September 22 and billed it as its Monday edition; September 22, 2026, fell on a Tuesday. The Innovation Exemption itself was issued on September 17, 2026, granting temporary, conditional relief from certain “exchange” and “dealer” definitions under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The Crypto Times covered the original order the same day.
Under the relief, an eligible platform can facilitate permissioned trading in tokenized versions of U.S.-listed National Market System (NMS) stocks through automated market makers (AMMs) and liquidity pools that run on public, permissionless blockchains. Although the order is already in force, a qualifying venue must publish an operating notice describing how it works and notify the SEC within one business day of that publication.
‘More onchain finance than DeFi’
Even though the model borrows AMMs and pooled liquidity from decentralized finance (DeFi), Lindman drew a firm line between the two. He described the structure as “more onchain finance than DeFi,” pointing to the fact that each qualifying venue will have a clearly identified person or entity responsible for running the platform and meeting the exemption’s conditions.
Peirce contrasted that setup with peer-to-peer DeFi systems that have no central operator. She said decentralized mechanisms could in principle support direct stock trading, but wider adoption of that route would raise broader regulatory questions the current order does not address.
The distinction shapes who is likely to file the first notices. A permissioned venue with a named operator can be held accountable under anti-fraud, sanctions, custody and disclosure standards in a way a leaderless protocol cannot. That effectively narrows the field to firms that already run compliant trading infrastructure or have the resources to build it.
Peirce says caps leave room for real platforms
Some in the industry have questioned whether limits on the number of symbols a TSV may list, and on how much volume it may handle in each stock, are too tight to support a commercially viable business. Peirce rejected that reading.
“The caps are high enough that people can really do something viable,” she told Crypto in America. “I’m not concerned that they’re so low that people can’t even do more than just a small experiment.”
She framed the restrictions as part of an iterative approach and said the commission can revisit them if they turn into an obstacle. For now, she said, firms have room for “substantial experimentation” within the boundaries the order sets.
Peirce also repeated that the five-year window is not intended to be permanent. She described it as a bridge to longer-term rules and said the agency could later add requirements once trading on a venue crosses certain thresholds, an approach she compared to how alternative trading systems, known as ATSs, are regulated today.
Asked about the risk that a future Commission could unwind the framework, particularly after the CLARITY Act failed to advance in the U.S. Senate on September 15, 2026, Peirce made a durable-design argument. “If you build good things, later administrations will want to keep them, too,” she said.
Issuer veto and links to traditional markets
The order also carries an issuer veto. A venue that wants to list a tokenized version of a public company’s stock created by an unaffiliated third party must give the issuer 30 days to object. An objection blocks the listing on that venue.
Peirce said she does not expect the veto to derail the model.
“The issuers that I’ve spoken with, a lot of them are really excited about something like this,” she said, adding that she anticipates “pretty broad excitement” among issuers.
She also pushed back on the concern that tokenized venues will remain walled off from traditional trading floors. Issuers care about liquidity, she said, and markets are “really good at interlinking different venues.”
“I’m really excited about seeing the tokenized markets interlink with the more traditional markets,” Peirce said. “I think that’ll be positive for our markets as a whole.”
Lindman said the SEC is already hearing from firms interested in operating a TSV. Some of that interest surfaced last week at the SEC’s roundtable on preparations for 24-hour trading, held September 17, 2026, at SEC headquarters in Washington, the same day the Innovation Exemption was issued, where Wall Street participants discussed continuous markets and blockchain-based trading infrastructure.
What the order already requires
The order grants temporary, conditional relief under Section 36(a)(1) of the Exchange Act. Qualifying TSVs can bring together buyers and sellers of tokenized NMS stock through permissioned AMM liquidity pools, and qualifying liquidity providers receive parallel relief from the “dealer” definition.
Covered tokens must represent the actual underlying security and carry the same economic and governance rights as traditional shares, including dividends and voting rights. Purely synthetic tokens that only track a stock’s price are excluded. A venue must be a U.S. person, set access standards for who may trade, permit the participants who can trade, publish transaction data, comply with sanctions, and operate under the symbol and volume caps. Federal securities anti-fraud rules continue to apply in full.
Galaxy’s head of firmwide research, Alex Thorn, recently walked through those same safeguards, arguing that the exclusion of synthetic products, the issuer opt-out, and the transparency mandates together address many of the concerns former SEC officials raised in the days after the order. The Crypto Times reported Thorn’s analysis on September 18, 2026.
The near-term test now is how quickly interested firms turn a written exemption into filed notices and live liquidity pools; if Lindman’s timeline holds, the first public signals of who intends to operate a TSV, and on which blockchains, should surface before the end of the year.
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