The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched a five-year Innovation Exemption on September 17, creating a temporary pathway for eligible onchain venues to trade certain tokenized U.S.-listed stocks under specified conditions. Participating platforms must obtain licenses, use audited smart contracts on public blockchains and provide tokenized shares with the same rights and benefits as their underlying stocks; trading must stop when the underlying stock is halted. The framework permits qualifying venues to operate without exchange registration and certain liquidity providers to avoid dealer registration when supplying tokenized stocks to automated market maker (AMM) pools, while excluding decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and products offering only synthetic exposure. Andrew Cuomo, former New York governor and an OKX board member, said tokenization is advancing faster than U.S. regulatory and legislative processes and that regulatory clarity will affect the movement of investment, talent and financial infrastructure. The framework follows a January SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) statement that tokenization changes a security’s form, not its legal status. Securitize shares rose more than 15% to $16.53, gaining 77% over five trading days and 158% over one month, as the company’s tokenization business benefited from the regulatory development. The exemption removes an obstacle for tokenization platforms but does not guarantee sustained demand or profitability, while broader digital-asset legislation remains unsettled.